Before the Puritans St. Mary’s: An Outpost of Faith A History of New France Puritan Free America November - December 2018 “The Church is the mystical Body of Christ, in which ‘if one part is suffering, all the rest suffer with it’ (I Cor 12:26). Hence, since many of these members today are being tortured and maltreated, it is the sacred duty of the faithful to be united with them in a sincere and deep sympathy. In some parts of the missions, the scourge of war has mercilessly razed to the ground churches and mission stations, schools and hospitals. To restore these losses and to reconstruct so many buildings, the whole Catholic world, which has proved its special care for and love of the missions, will generously furnish the necessary help.” Pius XII is quoting Fumasoni Biondi (prefect of the Propaganda Fide) Letter from the Publisher Dear Reader, The Mayflower’s landing in North America marked the arrival of the Puritan heresy in a country largely closed off to civilization and religion. The religious beliefs of Puritans went hand in hand with the hope of settling a messianic kingdom on earth. And so, after leaving a hostile England, they were eager to conquer, by might and main, a land where they would settle and prosper. And, soon enough, the Indian war would prove to be the political facet of the more profound spiritual struggle between truth and error. It is commonly taught that the territory which is presently the United States saw the dawn of civilization with the first wave of Puritans landing in the Boston harbor. This facile history however is passing over some really heroic and poignant missionary activities from literally all four corners of the country. Between the French settlements, from Canada to Louisiana via the Great Lakes, and the Spaniards, from settling the South from Florida to California, the United States was the stage for relentless efforts to learn the language and habits of the Native Americans so as to better teach them Heaven’s message and save their souls. The present issue of The Angelus covers some of the most epic history of this country, with its woes and glorious moments of the pre-Puritan era. It illustrates vividly the statement of Pius XII that “The preachers of the Gospel are using their talents and energy to extend the Kingdom of Christ; but there are other preachers who, since they profess materialism and reject all hope of eternal happiness, are trying to drag men down to an abject condition.” In the 21st century, we are currently witnessing former European Catholic bastions fast sinking into post-Christian nations and missionary lands, with the enemy in its very veins. Yet, the same phenomenon is certainly gaining speed in the American soil. And this is another reason for all our readers to help this missionary movement as if the survival and revival of Catholicism depended on it. Let me simply conclude this appeal with the final words of Pius XII: “There seems to be nothing more apt than the dogma of the “Communion of Saints” for bringing home to the people the utility and importance of the missions. With all the more reason, then, does the Catholic Church, most loving mother of all men, call on all her children to be zealous in helping these intrepid missionaries by their offerings, by prayer and by fostering missionary vocations.” Fr. Jürgen Wegner Publisher November - December 2018 Volume XLI, Number 6 Publisher Fr. Jürgen Wegner Editor-in-Chief Mr. James Vogel Managing Editor Fr. Dominique Bourmaud Assistant Editor Mr. Gabriel Sanchez Copy Editor Miss Jane Carver Design and Layout credo.creatie (Eindhoven, The Netherlands) Mr. Simon Townshend Director of Operations Mr. Brent Klaske U.S. Foreign Countries Subscription Rates 1 year 2 years 3 years $45.00 $85.00 $120.00 $65.00 $125.00 $180.00 Contents Letter from the Publisher 4 Theme: Before the Puritans ––Saint Mary’s: An Outpost of the Faith ––Civilization, Colonization, and the Missionary Spirit: European Encounters in the New World ––Success Through Failure: A History of New France ––The Hudson River Valley, Washington Irving, and a Puritan-Free America 6 10 15 22 Spirituality ––The Sacrifice of the Cross, Made Visible: Padre Pio ––The Kyrie and Gloria ––Evangelii Praecones ––Gothic Noel ––San Agustín, Florida and the City of God 28 34 40 44 48 (inc. Canada and Mexico) All payments must be in U.S. funds only. Online subscriptions: $20.00/year. To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Register for free to access back issues 14 months and older. All subscribers to the print version of the magazine have full access to the online version. Christian Culture ––A History of Catholic Liberalism ––St. Anne de Beaupré ––The Forgiveness of Offenses ––Miracles and the Laws of Nature ––Questions and Answers 50 56 60 63 70 “Instaurare omnia in Christo” The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published bi-monthly under the patronage of St. Pius X and Mary, Queen of Angels. Publication office is located at PO Box 217, St. Marys, KS 66536. PH (816) 753-3150; FAX (816) 753-3557. Periodicals Postage Rates paid at Kansas City, MO. Manuscripts and letters to the editor are welcome and will be used at the discretion of the editors. The authors of the articles presented here are solely responsible for their judgments and opinions. Postmaster sends address changes to the address above. ©2018 BY ANGELUS PRESS. OFFICIAL PUBLICATION OF THE PRIESTLY SOCIETY OF SAINT PIUS X FOR THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA News from Tradition ––Church and World ––Dignitatis Humanae ––The Last Word 74 79 87 Theme Before the Puritans Saint Mary’s An Outpost of the Faith by Andrew J. Clarendon Christ, before ascending from this earth, commanded His disciples to “teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” From that day to the present, faithful men and women, illuminated with zeal and often at the cost of their lives, have spread the Gospel around the globe. A millennium and a half later, after Europeans discovered the lands of the western hemisphere, missionaries arrived to bring the native peoples into the Mystical Body of Christ. It was Franciscan priests who first evangelized presentday Mexico; one of the millions they baptized was St. Juan Diego to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared. Later, Franciscan missions like the one associated with Fr. Juan de Padilla and that 6 The Angelus November - December 2018 of St. Junípero Serra pushed into the present-day southwestern United States. Heroic Dominicans like St. Louis Bertrand and Bishop Bartolomé de Las Casas worked to baptize the natives and defend them against rapacious colonists. Amazing Growth However, this period is best known for the amazing growth and accomplishments of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuit Order, beginning with only 10 tattered men in 1537, soon grew into a formidable force that left a lasting mark on all aspects of the Church’s life: preaching, asceticism, scholarship, and missionary work. Even before the formalities of the establishment of the Society of Jesus were complete in 1540, St. Ignatius sent St. Francis Xavier to evangelize the vast expanses of the East, telling him to “Go! Enkindle and inflame the whole earth!” Other sons of St. Ignatius turned to the equally important missionary fields of the West. In the opening decades of the 17th century, Jesuits established the famous “reductions” in Paraguay; St. Peter Claver became the “Apostle to the Negroes,” signing himself in 1622 as Petrus Claver, ethiopum semper servus; and St. Isaac Jogues and his companions suffered martyrdom as they established the Faith in Canada and the northeastern United States. A more specific thread in the Saint Mary’s story begins in 1641 when, near the end of his first visit to the New World, St. Isaac Jogues and Fr. Charles Raymbaut met representatives of the Potawatomi tribe in Michigan. Related to the Ottowa and Chippewa, the Potawatomi were originally from the upper Mississippi River region. Spreading across the lower Great Lakes region, from Green Bay to today’s Chicago and Detroit, the Potawatomi were evangelized until the suppression of the Jesuits and various wars left them without priests. The Faith did not perish altogether from them; like the Japanese on the other side of the world, they passed the rudiments of Catholic belief and prayers to their descendants until the return of the “blackrobes.” Responding to the desires of the children and grandchildren of those first evangelized by the Jesuits, Chief Pokegan in Detroit requested a priest; Fr. Stephen Badin, the first priest ordained in the United States, was sent to them from Kentucky. Within three years, about 600 became Catholic. Upon Fr. Badin’s death in 1837, Fr. Benjamin Marie Petit, a young French priest, took over the mission. By the 1830’s the United States government had enough interest in the lower Great Lakes region to forcibly move the native tribes west. The Illinois Potawatomi were sent to Nebraska while 859 of the Indiana Potawatomi, in what is known as the Trail of Death, were sent to Kansas in 1838. Fr. Petit accompanied his flock and died as a result of the rigors of the journey. Over 40 of the Potawatomi also died on the trail, over half of which were children. The tribe, now known as the Potawatomi of the Woods, first settled in “St. Mary’s is the pearl of the prairie” —Archbishop Lefebvre Osawatomie, Kansas, about 60 miles southwest of Kansas City. Belgium Missionaries Meanwhile, after the suppression of the Jesuits was lifted in 1805, missionary work in America sprang back to life as the old priests who were former Jesuits called on their younger brethren to come to the New World. Men from Belgium in particular answered the call: Fr. Charles Felix Van Quickenborne; Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet, the great apostle of the northwest; and Fr. John Felix Verreydt, the founder of Saint Mary’s. In 1823, Fr. Van Quickenborne and a small group of penniless Jesuits arrived in Florissant, Missouri to establish a Jesuit novitiate. 7 Theme Before the Puritans Already there were St. Philippine Duchesne and her Ladies of the Sacred Heart, an Order founded in France by St. Madeleine Sophie Barat. Although the primary mission of the Jesuits was to minister to the Catholics of that region, both Fr. Van Quickenborne and Mother Duchesne longed to evangelize the native tribes. In 1824, they attempted to open a school for native boys and girls—the education of the youth has been a part of the Saint Mary’s story from before the beginning of its foundation. Mission Schools Among the first Jesuit novices at Florissant were Fr. De Smet and Fr. Verreydt. After his ordination, Fr. Verreydt’s first work involved riding an arduous circuit to minister to Catholics in central and northeast Missouri. Meanwhile, Fr. Christian Hoecken, S.J., one of the great missionaries of Kansas, evangelized the Kickapoo tribe and then moved to southeast Kansas to care for the Potawatomies of Fr. Petit. In March 1839, the Potawatomies, along with Fr. Hoecken, moved about 15 miles south to Sugar Creek, a short distance east of presentday Centerville in Linn County. The settlement was named “Saint Mary’s Mission.” The next year a school was opened, and, while visiting Missouri, Fr. Hoecken thrilled Mother Duchesne with stories of the successes of the Potawatomi community. By 1841, the mission enjoyed a thriving Catholic life, with almost a thousand Catholic Indians and about 140 students in now separate boys’ and girls’ schools; the latter was staffed by four of Mother Duchesne’s Ladies of the Sacred Heart from St. Charles, Missouri. The saint herself visited that year with three other sisters and was received with great joy by the natives. The parish boasted many confraternities and liturgical functions, including eight-day missions preached according to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, May devotions, the blessing of crops, and elaborate Corpus Christi processions. All who came into contact with the mission praised the piety and industry of the Potawatomi. Confessors affirmed that some of the Indians led such innocent lives they probably 8 The Angelus November - December 2018 Pope John Paul II canonized Mother Philippine Duchesne as Saint Philippine, the fourth American saint in 1988. She was born August 29, 1769 in Grenoble, France. In 1818 she sailed for America; landed in New Orleans on May 29; reached St. Louis on August 21; opened the first Convent of the Sacred Heart in America at St. Charles, MO., on September 7. In 1841, she was one of the foundresses of the mission for Pottawatomie girls at Sugar Creek, Indian Territory. had never committed a mortal sin. Faced with the bitter trial of losing their native lands and the ever-present temptation of alcohol—which ruined many a man—the Faith gave the Potawatomi the spiritual resources to rise above the realities of a fallen world and reach for something higher. By the end of 1841, Fr. Verreydt was named superior and Saint Mary’s Mission became a focal point for the Jesuits in the region. Settle in St. Mary’s Fr. Pierre-Jean de Smet was Born in Dendermonde, Belgium. Fr. de Smet first came to the United States with eleven other Belgian Jesuits in 1821 to begin his novitiate at White Marsh, a Jesuit estate near Baltimore, Maryland. In 1823, Fr. de Smet moved west to St. Louis to complete his theological studies and to begin his studies of Native American languages. In 1825, Father de Smet and five other Belgian novices moved to Florissant, Missouri, north of St. Louis, at the invitation of bishop Dubourg. After further studies, he was ordained priest on September 23, 1827. Until 1830, he learned about Indian customs and languages as a prefect at the seminary. In 1838 and 1839, De Smet helped to establish St. Joseph’s Mission in what is now Council Bluffs, Iowa, in Potawatomi territory. Taking over the abandoned Council Bluffs Blockhouse at the former United States military fort, De Smet worked primarily with a Potawatomi band led by Billy Caldwell, also known as Sauganash. He was fluent in English and Mohawk, and some other Indian languages. However, in June 1846, the government signed a new treaty with the tribe allotting them a thirtymile-square track of land lying on both sides of the Kaw (now Kansas) River extending west of Topeka. Since the mission—now numbering about 1300—was forced to move with the tribe, Fr. Verreydt rode out to find a suitable location. In early June 1848, after asking the Blessed Mother to help him find a good site that he promised to name after her, Fr. Verreydt settled on the spot where Saint Mary’s campus is today. In September, a party consisting of the Fr. Verreydt and Fr. Maurice Gailland, S.J., the four Ladies of the Sacred Heart, Jesuit Brothers George Miles and Patrick Ragan, an Indian boarding student named Charlot, and the guide and interpreter Joseph Bertrand journeyed to the new site. They arrived at about four in the afternoon on Saturday, September 9, 1848, the date considered to be the founding of Saint Mary’s. All that was there when they arrived were two rough log buildings: one east of today’s Jogues Hall and one where the Convent is now. From the early days as a mission, Saint Mary’s eventually became the boys’ boarding school made famous by Father Finn, and then a Jesuit seminary where some 1,000 men were ordained in the Immaculata at the center of campus. After the Second Vatican Council, falling numbers of vocations led the Jesuits to abandon Saint Mary’s. In 1978, as in so many other places and ways, the Society of Saint Pius X resurrected the old campus, restoring the Mass, traditional education, and parish life. In this our age of crisis, in which much of the west is again mission territory, this “pearl of the prairie” stands as an outpost of the Faith. Author’s note: Most of the material for this article is taken from The St. Mary’s Magazine (Christmas, 1998). The author wishes particularly to thank Miss Mary Gentges (RIP), Miss Teresa Jones, and Mr. David Kleinsmith 9 Theme Before the Puritans Civilization, Colonization, and the Missionary Spirit European Encounters in the New World by Dr. Louis Shwartz A sense of cultural superiority informed and sustained the efforts of European colonizers and missionaries in the New World for centuries. The best among these daring Europeans sincerely and primarily desired to share the riches of Christian civilization with the primitive peoples they encountered in order to elevate, educate, and ennoble them—for the glory of God and the good of souls. The worst, indulging the dictates of fallen human nature, used their cultural superiority to overawe and subjugate the natives, forcing them to serve worldly desires for wealth, power, and glory. Yet in all cases—best, worst, and everything in between—European traditions, both on the natural and supernatural levels, were imposed upon (and later adopted and adapted by) the indigenous societies of the Americas, eventually creating a common Western cultural heritage. By outlining the cultural dynamics which governed the efforts of European colonizers and missionaries in the New World, my brief article hopes to provide essential context for the more focused studies of specific missionary endeavors 10 The Angelus November - December 2018 contained in this thematic volume. Finally, my essay also contrasts the historical traditions of missionary work in the New World with the novel modern emphasis on cultural pluralism and religious liberty. Vision of Missionary Work A striking vision of the traditional notions which long informed European missionary work is preserved in an elaborate and highly symbolic woodcut introducing the 1669 edition of the Latin Vulgate Bible printed in Lyon, France. In the image, the Bible itself rests open atop the Ark of the Covenant and is surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists. The Holy Ghost, represented by a lightsome dove, shines heavenly wisdom onto the open page, indicating that the sacred text is divinely inspired. An allegorical figure representing the Church (a woman fittingly named Ecclesia) wears the papal tiara while supporting the Cross of Christ, holding a chalice and host (representing the Eucharistic sacrifice), a book (containing authoritative teaching), and the two keys given by Christ to Peter (signifying the power to bind and loose). Most pertinent to the current study, out of the Church’s bosom shines the light of Christ upon a darkened globe. The light represents the Christian Faith, and the darkness signifies the religious ignorance still enveloping the world beyond the traditional boundaries of the ancient Roman empire. The implication is clear: in God’s plan, the light of Faith must spread outward from Rome, the heart of Christian Europe. Hundreds of years later in 1892, Pope Leo XIII adopted similar imagery when praising the greatest of all European colonizers: Christopher Columbus. In the encyclical Quarto Abeunte Saeculo, the pope notes that Columbus braved the “shadowy sea” (mare tenebrosum, i.e., the Atlantic Ocean) and heroically helped to elevate hundreds of thousands of natives “cloaked in miserable darkness” from their “state of blindness.” Even as late as 1899, the British poet Rudyard Kipling famously invoked the “White Man’s Burden,” a responsibility incumbent upon the heirs of European civilization to bring the remaining primitive people of the world, “fluttered folk and wild,” out of night and “slowly toward the light.” All of this, of course, echoes the beautiful prologue to St. John’s Gospel which speaks of Christ (the Word) and His action in the world: “In Him was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shines in the darkness.” Historically, the light of Christian culture was not spread by missionaries alone; those directly tasked with providing religious education to the ignorant pagans of the New World 11 Theme Before the Puritans generally followed in the footsteps of European explorers. These explorers or colonizers first established some modicum of civilized order, a foundation upon which the missionaries then built. For example, a group of 500 Spanish soldiers under the command of Hernán Cortés was able, in the course of just two years, to conquer the vast Aztec Empire which boasted millions of inhabitants. The stunning defeat of the numerically superior, cannibalistic, devilworshipping, half-nude Aztecs was possible (in large part) due to superior European naval and military technology, but also due to the help and support of other native tribes who resented Aztec savagery. Once the Spanish conquistadors wrested political control from the Aztecs, they rapidly established a thoroughly European civilization among the primitive inhabitants of the Mexican peninsula. One of Cortés’s companions, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, recalled and lauded this monumental achievement. Writing in 1568, less than 40 years following the conquest of the Aztecs, Díaz proudly enumerated the cultural victories of the Spanish conquerors: European Blessings “Consider the number of cities of New Spain, which from their being so many I will not detail; our ten bishoprics, not including the archbishopric of the noble city of Mexico; the three courts of royal audience, together with the succession of governors, archbishops, and bishops; our holy cathedrals and monasteries, Dominican, Franciscan, Mercenarian, and Augustinian; our hospitals with the extensive remissions and pardons attached to them; and the Santa Casa of our Lady of Guadalupe with the holy miracles there performed every day. And let us give thanks to God, and to His Blessed Mother Our Lady, for giving us the grace and support to conquer these countries, where so much Christianity is now established. Let it be also remembered that in Mexico there is a university wherein are studied and learned grammar, theology, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, and the other sciences. There is also a printing press for books both in Latin and the vernacular, 12 The Angelus November - December 2018 and in this college they graduate as licentiates and doctors; to which I might add many other instances to enhance the value of these countries, such as the mines of silver, and other discoveries, whereby prosperity and grandeur redound to the mother country. ” Díaz, in his discussion of the many benefits brought to the New World by the Spanish, listed institutions of secular authority alongside religious foundations, educational achievements, spiritual benefits, temporal wealth, and industry—for they are all complementary parts of the same cultural heritage imported by Europeans to the Americas. This process of European inculturation, initiated most poignantly by the Spanish, eventually spread throughout the entire Western Hemisphere, binding the New World together with Europe to form the Christian West. The Portuguese, for their part, developed elaborate maps and charts, planted stone crosses at important locations on the coast, and set up trading posts all along the eastern coast of South America, linking these markets to their booming trade in West Africa (primarily in gold and slaves). Interestingly, when initial disputes arose between the Spanish and Portuguese over claims to the land, Pope Alexander VI formally resolved their competing suits in 1494 by simply dividing the territories of the New World between these two European powers. This treaty implied that European states had a right, supported by the Church, to bring these lands and their pagan inhabitants into the orbit of Catholic culture. Shortly after the Spanish and Portuguese claimed much of central and south America, the French imposed their authority in the north when royally commissioned Jacques Cartier erected the first French cross in modern-day Canada in 1534. The French would subsequently dominate the fur trade along the St. Lawrence River down to the Great Lakes, and then expand further inland, claiming the lands as their own “in the name of Jesus Christ” and bringing the Catholic Faith to the natives they encountered. Liturgical celebrations and ornate processions were often performed in the presence of the local Indians, who were encouraged to spectate and even participate. Imposing Order Protestant England came late to the colonizing rush with initial settlements along the Eastern Seaboard—for example, Jamestown in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. English settlers built fences, wrote down laws, composed contracts, erected stone buildings and fortifications, and planted gardens, thus indicating to any nearby natives that they cultivated a superior social order. As royal support for the English colonies increased over time, settlers pushed farther south and farther west, driving the Indians from their homelands. According to John Locke and other English intellectuals, Europeans had a right to civilize these lands, citing the scriptural mandate, “Increase and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” This process of civilizing conquest would continue long after North America’s independence from Great Britain, exemplified most famously by President Andrew Jackson’s relocation of thousands of Native Americans around the year 1830. Europeans, then, seemingly had both a right and a responsibility to establish Christian culture in the New World, conveying its many benefits to the ignorant and primitive natives. However, many evils also accompanied the work of colonization. European diseases such as smallpox devastated native populations, killing millions. Rape, enslavement, theft, and warfare were common. Perhaps worst of all, these sinful abuses perpetrated by Christians scandalized the natives, making their path to conversion much more troubled and difficult. Thus Europeans inflicted (both knowingly and unintentionally) many evils upon the inhabitants of the New World. Yet, greater evils predated the Europeans’ arrival—cannibalism, human Magellan’s ship Victoria, depicted in a hand-colored woodcut map, Theater of the World, printed in Antwerp, 1570. Theme Before the Puritans sacrifice, polygamy, idolatry, and devil-worship are simply the most egregious—all of which the Europeans eventually rooted out. In the final account, the benefits, particularly those of a spiritual and intellectual nature, conferred by European colonizers and missionaries upon the native pagan societies of the Americas arguably outweigh any evils simultaneously introduced. Yet the many benefits conferred by Europeans upon the indigenous societies of America do not excuse these sinful failings, and a vivid memory of abuse still remains. Modern popes such as John Paul II acknowledged that outrages had been committed by European Catholics against the natives of the New World. Most recently, Pope Francis publicly stated during his July 2015 visit to Latin America: Shift in Approach “I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the Church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America. I also want us to remember the thousands and thousands of priests who strongly opposed the logic of the sword with the power of the Cross. There was sin, and it was plentiful. But we never apologized, so I now ask for forgiveness. But where there was sin, and there was plenty of sin, there was also an abundant grace increased by the men who defended indigenous peoples.” The Pope speaks with pastoral care and solicitude, but when focusing on the sins committed by Europeans against the indigenous peoples, one risks downplaying or even overlooking the many blessings, both temporal and spiritual, conferred by the conquest of the New World. Ultimately, the salvation of very many souls flowed and continues to flow from this “lamentable” conquest! A shift in perspective has unquestionably affected the modern Church’s approach to missionary work and pagan cultures. In its official Declaration on the Church’s Relation to Non-Christian Religions, the Second Vatican Council proclaims: “The Catholic Church rejects nothing of those 14 The Angelus November - December 2018 things which are true and holy in these [false] religions. It regards with respect those ways of acting and living and those precepts and teachings which, though often at variance with what the Church hold and expounds, frequently reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens everyone…The Church therefore calls upon all its sons and daughters with prudence and charity, through dialogues and cooperation with the followers of other religions, bearing witness to the Christian Faith and way of life, to recognize, preserve, and promote those spiritual and moral good things as well as the socio-cultural values which are to be found among them.” Christians, then, according to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, should promote the “good” aspects of pagan cultures, even though those cultures are “often at variance” with Church teachings. The notions of religious liberty and cultural pluralism supported by this conciliar text eventually lead, according to Archbishop Lefebvre, to “the disappearance in the Church of the missionary spirit for the conversion of souls.” In order for any society to be worthy of the title “Roman Catholic,” it must embrace the traditional Christian culture of European civilization. This, at least, was the centuries-old assumption of Catholic missionaries to the New World. For is there any other way to be truly Roman, and thus truly Catholic? Yet the modern Church tends to downplay the preeminence of Rome in God’s providential plan so as to embrace and foster cultural diversity. And thus Eternal Rome—the great city on a hilltop, the heart of Christian civilization, once openly proclaimed to be the sole Mistress of Truth and the light unto the nations—now seems to be a candle hidden under a bushel. Success Through Failure A History of New France by Fr. Dominique Bourmaud, SSPX The book of Protestant Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, opens with the arrival of French missionaries in Canada in 1632. This study clearly portrays intertribal rivalries and tensions between French and English traders. However, the dramatic pulse of Parkman’s narrative centers on attempts of the Jesuits to befriend, convert, and mediate between the Indian tribes—resulting in great hardship and sometimes martyrdom for the Jesuits. As he describes the various phases of the establishment of North East Canada, mostly the Quebec province, he brings to full light the endless warfare which has always been the lot of the Churchmen and their allies. Some 70 years after the French sailor Cartier had first set foot in that wilderness, the French crown with Governor Champlain had established a stronghold, Fort Saint-Louis, in Quebec City in the early 1600. But the Catholics would have to contend with two powerful opponents who finally thwarted their designs. The Indian landscape By the middle of the 17th century, in Canada and the Northern United States, the elements of change were especially active. The Indian population which, in 1535, Cartier found at Montreal and Quebec, had disappeared and another race had succeeded, in language and customs widely different while, in the region now forming the state of New York, a power was rising to a ferocious vitality, which, but for the presence of Europeans, would probably have subjected, 15 Theme Before the Puritans absorbed, or exterminated every other Indian community east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio. The vast expanse from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and from the Carolinas to the Hudson Bay, was divided between two great families of tribes with a vastly different language. From Virginia to New England all the way to Nova Scotia, the territory was occupied by tribes speaking various Algonquin languages and dialects. They extended also along the shores of the Upper Lakes. Like a great island in the midst of the Algonquin territory lay the country of tribes speaking the generic tongue of the Iroquois. The true Iroquois, or Five Nations, extended through Central New York and spread to lake Erie. The other nation which spoke the language, and yet behaved quite differently, was the Huron nation. Their towns lay near the lake which bears their name. If we speak of numbers, we must stress that the densest of the Algonquin populations was in New England. They were the most advanced of these savage tribes, belonging to that section of it which tilled the soil, and was thus in some measure spared the extremes of misery and degradation to which the wandering hunter tribes were often reduced. They owed much, also, to the bounty of the sea, and hence they tended towards the coast. Yet, however relatively populous these tribes were, they could hardly have mustered 8,000 fighting men. These in fact were beyond the reach of the Jesuits as the Puritan heresy was the first to reach out to them. The Jesuits, under the protection of the French governor, were assigned the incongruous portion of the present Eastern part of Canada, with fairly little of civilization awaiting them as these new missionaries set foot in 1632 for the first time in the new world. Ascending the St. Lawrence, seldom was there the sight of a human form to break the loneliness of the expanse until, at Quebec, the roar of Champlain’s cannon from the verge of the cliff announced that the savage prologue of the American drama was drawing to a close, and that the civilization of Europe was advancing on the scene. Ascending farther, short of Three Rivers, an important settlement and trade spot, solitude dominated. Not even 16 The Angelus November - December 2018 Montreal was a place worth a pause, save during a brief space in early summer, when the shore swarmed with savages, who had come to the yearly trade from the great communities of the interior. For the Jesuits who wished to work at converting these hordes of savages, they would have to follow their flock through torrents and thickets for hundreds of miles of most arduous and perilous journeying. Their presence early in the century proved crucial to the French government in a time when the British were invading Quebec. The conjugated action of the religious with the efforts of Champlain were able to maintain the king’s belief in the survival of the colonization of these desert lands. It was clear that the propagation of the Faith was the main purpose of the French colony, and Louis XV did not think otherwise who wished that Rome had a bastion in North America called New France. Jesuit achievements One of the first of these tribes to become open to the Gospel was the Nation of the Porcupine who had heard the Jesuits speak to them of God while trading at Three Rivers. Fr. De Quen, went along with them to their towns in 1646. He saw that converts had planted a Cross on the borders of the savage lake where they dwelt. Another band close by, the Nation of the White Fish, also proved docile. They threw away their “medicines”, burned their magic drums, renounced their medicine-songs, and accepted instead rosaries, crucifixes, and versions of Catholic hymns. De Brebeuf and his band had much further to travel before reaching the outpost of his savages. When he reached his destination, he saw and heard a people speaking a dialect of the Iroquois tongue. Here all was changed. Populous towns, rude fortifications, and an extensive, though barbarous tillage, indicated a people far in advance of the famished wanderers North of Three Rivers or even of New England. These were the Hurons, of whom the modern Wyandots are a remnant. Their submission to the Gospel obtained by the magnificent work of years of deprivation and prayers of the Jesuits The Canadian Martyrs Shrine honors the eight Jesuit saints who lived, worked, and died in Ontario and New York over 350 years ago. They came from France intent on spreading the Catholic Faith, ready to give their lives for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. They built the first Church in Ontario and converted many of the Hurons—the native people. Within the National Shrine are the relics of three out of the eight Martyrs: St. Jean de Brebeuf, St. Gabriel Lalemant, and St. Charles Garnier. Theme Before the Puritans missionaries is well documented in more specific studies. Another interesting advance of the evangelical message was offered to Fr. Druilletes, who ministered to the Montagnais, established in the northern part of Maine. Reaping the fruit of intensive labor which other Jesuits like Lejeune had sown, his travel companions were all converts who looked on him as a friend and a father. There were prayers, confessions, Masses, and invocations of St. Joseph. They built their bark chapel at every camp, and no festival of the Church passed unobserved. On Good Friday, they laid their best robe of beaver-skin on the snow, placed on it a crucifix, and knelt around it in prayer. What was their prayer? It was a petition for the forgiveness and the conversion of their enemies, the Iroquois. Those who know the intensity and tenacity of an Indian’s hatred will see in this something more than a change from one superstition to another. An idea had been presented to the mind of the savage, as Parkman surmised, to which he had previously been an utter stranger. This is the most remarkable record of success in the whole body of the Jesuit Relations that, in teaching the dogmas and observances of the Roman Church, the missionaries taught also the morals of Christianity. When we look for the results of these missions, we soon become aware that the influence of the French and the Jesuits extended far beyond the circle of converts. It eventually modified and softened the manners of many unconverted tribes. In the wars of the next century, we do not often find those examples of diabolic atrocity with which the earlier annals are crowded. True, the savage burned his enemies alive but he rarely ate them, and he did not torment them with the same deliberation and persistence. He was a savage still, but not so often a devil. The merit of such change is attributed primarily to French priests and colonists. In this softening of manners, such as it was, and in the obedient Catholicity of a few hundred tamed savages gathered at stationary missions in various parts of Canada, we find a century later all the results of the heroic toil of the Jesuits. The missions had failed, because the Indians had ceased to exist. Of the great tribes on whom rested the hopes of the early Canadian Fathers, nearly all were virtually extinct. The missionaries built laboriously and well, but they were doomed to build on a failing foundation. Parkman’s strongly suggests that the Indians were destroyed, not by the incoming civilization, but because of their own ferocity and intractable indolence. New France vs. New England settlements The few Jesuits who had the opportunity to act as ambassadors to New England colonies were evidently struck with the thrift and vigor of these sturdy young colonies, and the strength of their population. Some of them said that the four united colonies could count forty thousand souls. These numbers may be challenged; but, at all events, the contrast was striking with the attenuated and suffering bands of priests, nuns, and fur-traders on the St. Lawrence. About twenty-one thousand persons had come from Old to New England, with the resolve of making it their home; and though this immigration had virtually ceased, the natural increase had been great. The need to escape persecution had given the impulse to Puritan colonization; while, on the other hand, none but good Catholics, the favored class of France, were tolerated in Canada. These had no motive for exchanging the comforts of home and the smiles of Fortune for a starving wilderness and the scalping-knives of the Iroquois. The Huguenots would have emigrated in swarms; but they were rigidly forbidden. The appeal to save the souls of the Indians and the fur-trade were the vital forces. Of her feeble population, the best part was bound to perpetual chastity; while the fur- traders and those in their service rarely brought their wives to the wilderness. But beyond this, the religious ideal of the rival colonies was crucial to tilt the scales. It alone could have produced the contrast in material growth. To the mind of the Puritan, heaven was God’s throne; but no less was the earth His footstool: and each in its degree and its kind had its demands on man. He held it a duty to labor and to multiply; and, building on the Old Testament quite as much as on the New, thought that a reward on earth as well as in heaven awaited those who were faithful to the law. Doubtless, such a belief is widely open to abuse, and it would be folly to pretend that it escaped abuse in New England; but there was in it an element manly, healthful, and invigorating. On the other hand, those who shaped the character and the destiny of New France had always on their lips the nothingness and the vanity of life. For them, time was nothing but a preparation for eternity, and the highest virtue consisted in a renunciation of all the cares, toils, and interests of earth. It is the monastic idea carried into the wide field of active life. And it is akin to the error of those who, trying to imitate the angelic life, suffer the neglected body to dwindle and pine, but this is not the way to fight a war on both front, military as well as religious. Theme Before the Puritans The End We mentioned the first enemy of New France in the name of the Puritan English colonies. The other enemy was the ferocious people of the Iroquois. They consisted in a confederacy of five nations, bound together as by clans; their government was an oligarchy in form and a democracy in spirit; their minds, thoroughly savage, yet marked here and there with traits of a vigorous development. The war which they had long-waged with the Huron was carried on by the Seneca and the other Western nations of their league; while the conduct of hostilities against the French and their Indian allies in Lower Canada was left to the Mohawks. Had they joined to their ferocious courage the discipline and the military knowledge that belong to civilization, they could easily have blotted out New France from the map, and made the banks of the St. Lawrence once more a solitude; but, though the most formidable of savages, they were savages only. When they had been given muskets by the Dutch, they were no more afraid of Champlain’s cannons and were ready for the battle to the death. The cause of the failure of the Jesuits is obvious. The guns and tomahawks of the Iroquois were the ruin of their hopes. Could they have 20 curbed or converted those ferocious bands, it is little less than certain that their dream would have become a reality. Savages tamed, yet not civilized, would have been distributed in communities through the valleys of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, ruled by priests in the interest of Catholicity and of France. Their habits of agriculture would have been developed, and their instincts of mutual slaughter repressed. The swift decline of the Indian population would have been arrested; and it would have been made, through the fur-trade, a source of prosperity to New France. Unmolested by Indian enemies, and fed by a rich commerce, she would have put forth vigorous growth. True to her far-reaching and adventurous genius, she would have occupied the West with traders, settlers, and garrisons, and cut up the virgin wilderness into fiefs, while as yet the colonies of England were but a weak and broken line along the shore of the Atlantic. And, when the great conflict came, England and Protestantism would have been confronted, not by a feeble and depleted antagonist, but by an athletic champion of the principles of Richelieu and of Loyola. The Jesuits saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not shaken, was sorely tried. The Providence of God seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable. Meanwhile let those who have prevailed yield due honor to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent. Here is how French author Goyau on the Origines religieuses du Canada, saw the work of Catholic France in North America: “It is through the gate of the St. Lawrence that the Roman Church penetrated for the first time into North America, and it is under the French flag that she took root. England or Holland, spreading their colonies over the Atlantic shores, brought along varieties of Protestantism. Maryland, a colony created by Catholics who had right away proclaimed the liberty of the true Faith, was closed to the Roman Church for years after it fell to the Puritans. New France alone was a dique against the heresy. First explorers, first apostles Franciscans or Jesuits, first Ursulines, had wished to establish both France and Rome. France, one day, would be chased away, but the tie with Rome would maintain the memory of the motherland.” And for over 150 years, the Christian and French civilization modeled the Canadian souls so powerfully that, despite all efforts of England to impose its language and religion, it survived the ordeal. And although the king of France was the loser and the king of England the winner, the solidarity between France and Catholicism proved stronger in Canada than this other solidarity which united the interests of Protestants with those of England. It was because the colony was firstly Catholic and secondly French that, after the defeat, Catholicism still maintained its powerful roots, even though the French crown was out the picture. The Cross was to endure over the broken sword. The Martyrs’ Shrine at Fort Ste. Marie, Midland, Ontario, links the Church in Ontario with the heroic age of the Huron missionaries of nearly 300 years ago. Fort Ste. Marie was begun in 1639 and was the first building of any importance in Ontario. Here was Ontario’s first church, its first hospital and here was found the central residence for the Jesuit Missionaries laboring among the Hurons on Georgian Bay. During the 10 years of its existence, Fort Ste. Marie was a Pilgrim Shrine, the first place of pilgrimage north of Mexico. 21 Theme Before the Puritans The Hudson River Valley, Washington Irving, and a Puritan-Free America by Dr. John Rao Puritanism, its impact, and what America might have been like without it always comes to my mind when I take the train from New York City up the Hudson River Valley. The breathtaking beauty that one contemplates during the entire journey from the Palisades northwards makes the dreary Puritan mentality—which unnaturally seals off the earthly realm from all that might lift it out of its heretically “flattened” state—seem even more incomprehensible than any purely intellectual argument against it. For everything that nature displays along the river route should vigorously stimulate a fallen man’s desire to lift up his heart to the Creator and add his own limited human bit to the enhancement of the divine achievement, rather than to lament the likeliness that working with the surrounding physical world would lead him straight to the devil. 22 The Angelus November - December 2018 Washington Irving (1783-1859) reveals the partial flight from a drearily “flattened” vision of reality of the early 19th century inhabitants of the region through his recounting of their fantasies and ghost stories regarding Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But in other writings lamenting the failings of his own land and the troubles he experienced as a diplomat in Europe, he also provides us a three-step guide to making a truly serious as opposed to a simplistic and delusional meditation on what a non-Puritan Catholic River Valley and the sursum corda provided its inhabitants by a Catholic America might have been like: “The last 10 or 12 years of my life, passed among sordid speculators in the United States and political adventurers in Spain, has shown me so much of the dark side of human nature that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow man. I look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be.” Pursuit of Material Concerns Irving’s comments guide us first of all to the chief consequence of a Puritan society: the reduction of life on earth to the pursuit of the “flat” material concerns of private individuals engaged in a relentless “war of all against all.” This is the inevitable result of the “Original Sin” of Puritanism—its ideological obsession with the total depravity of mankind after the Fall, along with the logical deductions to be made therefrom. Utterly false in its foundations and immoral in its expectations, a Puritan civilization cannot help but be dominated by men for whom the word “ugly” means nothing more than “a lack of pragmatism and measurable personal gain”: i.e., a failure to embrace “flatness.” And although this has meant a war for attainment of a variety of sinful aims that willful individual “speculators” and the gangs they form among themselves for mutual power and profit may seek, the tendency is for all of these goals to be—as Irving indicates—ever more sordid—flat—in their character. As Louis Veuillot already noted in the 19th century: “Between the sensualists of the past and the sensualists of our day, there is the same difference as between the great lords who ran about the world astonishing it with their prodigal behavior, and those sons of the wealthy to whose splendors and decadence one section of Paris is exposed. The first wanted to ruin themselves and did not succumb to it; the latter calculate, are rich, yet succumb without even having known to make a semblance of being magnificent. Everything is lacking to the poverty of our times, including the brilliance and often even the substance of the vices it would like to have” (L. Veuillot, Mélanges [Oeuvres complete, iii series, 1933, iv, 2-3]). A vision so unnatural as that of the Puritans needs time to take effect. Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859), American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat. He is best known for his short stories “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), both of which appear in his collection, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Catholic Beauty Catholicism in all its fullness—with its insistence upon what the Puritans consider to be a devilishly inspired belief in the possibility of the coordination of human action with the laws of God and His creation through the positive intervention of individual free will and social authorities seeking the common good—would have obstructed the inevitable, downward, sordid spiral. Catholic minds, hearts, and souls would have filled the River Valley with structures 23 Theme Before the Puritans meant for the public exaltation and good; beautiful works of openly communal purpose: magnificent hilltop churches dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel, along with imposing castles garrisoned by soldiers sent to guard their altars and the good people of the villages that might have huddled around them from threats to the soul as well as the body. As it is, almost everything that is undeniably beautiful that was constructed by human hand in this region testifies to the importance in America of purely private physical possessions and the daily round of “flat,” practical activities required in order to obtain them. Wealthy persons with good taste certainly added their human bit to the regional beauty, building splendid homes in the Hudson Valley from the 18th century onwards. Nevertheless, being private, their charms and their river views generally have to be hunted down through back access roads. Moreover, their beauty was not meant for open public consumption until money concerns made the common man’s access to them a necessity for their owners. Meanwhile, the Puritan rot continued to work its corrosive influence on the spirit of those men and women indeed retaining some intuition of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful but lacking the intellectual and spiritual means that the Catholic Faith would have given to them for fully enhancing and maintaining it. Still, lest we rashly boast of how a Catholic America would therefore have been one big painless and equally inevitable sursum corda, the second of Irving’s guides to meditation, his complaint about Spanish “political adventurers” should give us pause for thought. He is speaking here about the various generals who took advantage of the disturbed situation of the Iberian Peninsula of the 19th century to conduct one Bonaparte-style coup d’état after another. Such military men were only able to play their games due to the convulsions brought about by the French Revolution, which actually impacted upon Catholic lands even more than Puritan ones. Yes, the Great Revolution was indeed in major part an effect of the general weakening of the Church brought about by the Reformation, but it was by no means entirely so. Other vexing 24 The Angelus November - December 2018 issues, stretching all the way back to the greatest days of the Catholic Middle Ages, themselves contributed to its explosion and devastating effects. Sad to say, a medieval world that never heard of John Calvin or John Knox was already bitterly fighting over what to those among us without an accurate knowledge of history might seem to be purely “Puritan” positions: questions regarding whether human reason could play a role in understanding the Faith or if transformation in Christ of any part of nature at all was possible at the hands of sinful men. Already at that time, struggles of State and Church—along with the angry assertion of exaggerated roles for one or the other that ended up promoting an overly political or theocratic guidance of Christian society—were very badly disrupting the proper cooperation of the natural and the supernatural realms. Optimism and Pessimism Such battling continued in Catholic lands after 1517 and all the way down to 1789, pitting Jesuits versus Jansenists, Ultramontanists against Gallicans and Febronians, and various “devout parties” in opposition to politicos insisting that the secular glory of societies guided by rulers calling themselves “Most Christian Kings” was what really counted in building a civilization pleasing to God. In fact, such disputes, in one way or another, have been the stuff of Church History from its very outset in Roman times. Why would we expect that a Catholic America beginning its career in the 17th century would have been the sole country capable of ridding itself of them? We would only expect this if we neglected the importance of our author’s third—and perhaps unintended—guide to our meditation, his nostalgic recollection of his youthful days of self-deluding optimism. Optimism and pessimism are not Catholic categories; they are groundless flights from solid Christian hope. This takes seriously both substantive sinful reality as well as the truth and divine grace capable of wrestling with it. Any traditionalist “optimism” in our present and carefree days of having no influence whatsoever over political and social life would make us falsely believe that a Catholic America might have been free of the medieval battling that gave rise to Protestantism and the spread of anti-religious modernity in the first place. And this false belief would reveal its groundlessness should we ever actually come to have an opportunity to wield effective impact in our native land. It could then easily lead us to embrace the equally unnecessary pessimism and despair that Irving’s own nostalgic comments about his earlier optimism seem sadly to reveal. We could only be so “optimistic” about a Catholic America if we ourselves went down what in many respects was, ironically, a primrose Puritan path. This path, from the very outset, involved an “optimistic” flight from reality. For Puritans, just like the originally less rigorously logical Protestants of the Lutheran camp, vainly tried to flee from the inevitably sordid consequences of the fundamental doctrine of total depravity that they all share in common and all jointly detest. Protestants have all “optimistically” tried to separate out belief in total depravity from its destruction of individual free will and a society based upon altruistic human cooperation with God’s creation and grace. They have done so through the invention of various theological games that we have no time to investigate in detail in the present article. One distinctly Calvinist doctrine called “preparationism” offers a kind of preliminary “space” in which human action might continue to have some impact over an individual’s destiny. It makes an appearance in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter. Another is that of Calvin himself, dictating construction of a pseudo-ecclesiastical society to replace the real community dismantled by Luther to the benefit of the power of the State. The Puritans have played a particularly optimistic role in our own land by nurturing the groundless vision that that which was impossible for man to achieve in a totally depraved Catholic Europe could be accomplished by raising up a New Jerusalem in a wondrously purified American environment. Unfortunately, the proponents of this American City on a Hill ultimately decided that it could fulfill its mission on its own steam, through the teaching of its own Founders and the grace provided by its own Foundation Documents—as opposed to relying on Christ and Scripture. It is only by accepting this lie and redefining Catholicism to fit its demands that we could be “optimistic” about some magically strife-free and non-Puritan America, exceptional in its ability to escape all the battles of the entirety of Church History. Abandonment of Doctrine An abandonment of the doctrine of total depravity and a return to the fullness of the Catholic Faith and the life-long struggle required to make its impact felt would have been the only way for (former) Puritans to cultivate a Christian hope for themselves in general and for America in particular. It is our only hope as at least nominal Catholics as well. Lacking such a development, America will go even further down the sordid speculative path that Irving already lamented. The inhabitants of the Hudson River Valley will lack the tools they need to maintain an appreciation of the beautiful homes that indeed still remain there, now open to public viewing. They will knock them and level the hills they were built upon to construct more accessible and profitable industrial complexes, fast food joints, discotheques, as well as the parking lots needed to accommodate workers and partygoers who cannot imagine anything other than living in a Godless, “flat” civilization. Still, at least the Valley inhabitants will not have to provide accommodation for those who break whatever continuing rules might temporarily still remain accepted in the ever more total war of all against all. For an ugly, functional building, suitable for a land filled with men that Puritans considered all to be criminals, without exception, in the eyes of God, is already available for that purpose: a prison called Sing Sing. 25 For our ancient enemy ceases not daily to do the very same thing which he did in Paradise. For he endeavors to pluck out the words of God from the hearts of men, and to plant therein the false blandishments of his own promising. He day by day softens down the threatenings of God, and invites to the belief of his false promises. For he falsely promises temporal blessings, to soften down in men’s minds those eternal punishments which God threatens. For, when he promises the glory of this life, what else does he do but say, “Taste, and ye shall be as gods?” As if he said plainly, “Lay hold on worldly desires, and appear lofty in this world.” And when he endeavors to remove the fear of the divine sentence, what else does he say but the very words he used to our first parents, “Why hath God commanded you that ye should not eat of every tree of paradise?” (Gen. 3:1) Gregory I, Morals on Job 24:14 Spirituality The Sacrifice of the Cross, Made Visible Padre Pio by Fr. François-Marie Chautard, SSPX The July-September 2018 issue of Le Chardonnet (#340) includes an article by Fr. François-Marie Chautard on Padre Pio, the stigmatized priest who died 50 years ago on September 23, 1968. One of Padre Pio’s missions was to “make the Cross of Jesus Christ visible.” Christ took on human form in order to make the invisible visible. This revelation of God did not end with His Ascension, for upon His return to His Father, Our Lord sent the Spirit of Holiness. Since then, every century has had its share of saints whose perfect lives in imitation of Christ seem to renew His Incarnation. The exterior life of some saints sometimes espouses that of Christ so perfectly that they relive His Passion in their own flesh. St. Francis of Assisi is the most well-known of them all, and many an artist has illustrated the Poverello receiving the stigmata. Other 28 The Angelus November - December 2018 saints also experienced this extraordinary phenomenon: St. Catherine of Sienna, or Madame Acarie (Blessed Marie de l’Incarnation), whose stigmatas were invisible. The Sacrifice of the Cross, Made Visible But until September 20, 1918, not a single priest, despite their sacramental union with Christ the High Priest, had ever yet been chosen to renew in his own flesh the mystery of the Sacrifice of the Cross. On September 20, 1918, as he was praying before a crucifix, hung before the monks’ choir, rays of light from the crucifix pierced his hands, feet and side like arrows. The young 31-year-old Capuchin did not know it yet, but for the next 50 years, until September 20, 1968, he would bear the visible marks of the Passion of Christ that he relived every day. One of Padre Pio’s missions had begun: that of making the Cross of Jesus Christ visible, of enlightening souls as to the reality of the sacrifice renewed on the altar and reminding priests and faithful of the priest’s vocation as a victim: “Unless the grain of wheat dies, it will not bear fruit.” “Do as you have seen me do.” Heroic Virtues Born on May 25, 1887, into a peasant family, little Francesco Forgione was the fourth of seven children. His parents had a very simple life and lived in a poor home in Pietrelcina. They were solid Christians and hard workers. The parish church is dedicated to St. Pius I, pope and martyr, and it was in his honor that the young Capuchin chose the name of Fra Pio. As a young boy, Francesco was already favored with visions and extraordinary phenomena. From his earliest years until the end of his life, Padre Pio was used to receiving visits from angels, Marian apparitions and...being subjected to diabolical violence. At first, the child thought all other boys his age experienced the same things. Beware, dear reader, for this is where devotion to Padre Pio could go astray. As the spiritual authors explain, extraordinary phenomena are not sanctity; they sometimes, and even often, go hand in hand; they can occur without sanctity, but they must be carefully distinguished from it. If Padre Pio is a saint, it is not because of his bilocation and other exceptional phenomena, but because of his heroic virtues. And little Francesco practiced heroic virtue from the very start. Did his mother not find him sleeping on the ground, with his head on a rock? His piety was solid, his obedience absolute, his diligence in his studies and duties more than admirable, and his friendship exemplary. At the age of 15, a strange vision implicitly 29 Spirituality revealed his future to him: an angel invited him to fight against a giant much stronger than him. Reluctantly, the young teenager fought and won. With this divine commemoration of David and Goliath, Providence announced to Francesco the violence of the battles to come. A few weeks later, on January 22, 1903, at the age of 15, he entered the Capuchin novitiate of Morcone, and took the name Fra Pio da Pietrelcina. His mother was there, but his father was in the United States, working to pay for his childrens’ studies. For seven years total (3 and then 4), this admirable father was separated from his no less admirable wife and his dear children in order to provide for them all. The young novice’s studies continued until 1909. The young monk proved serious, studious and satisfactory, but not brilliant. Towards the end of his studies, he rapidly ascended the sanctuary steps; after receiving the first minor orders in 1908, he was ordained a deacon the following year in July 1909. Health Trials But health troubles came to try the young monk. He had to interrupt his studies and even the convent life and was ordered to go rest at his family’s home in Pietrelcina. This temporary rest would last…seven years. Despite this difficulty, he was ordained a priest in the cathedral of Benevento on August 10, 1910, and celebrated his first Mass in Pietrelcina on August 14. Separated from the other Capuchins, and a prey to terrible interior trials, he corresponded regularly during this period with Fr. Agostino, his spiritual director, who told him to write down his interior combat and the extraordinary graces he received. One superior planned to send him away to live as a secular priest, but he was told to return to the convent in 1911. The devil was furious, and he attacked and beat the young mystic so violently that the guardian of the convent, moved by a very Franciscan inspiration, ordered Padre Pio to ask for the grace to be tormented…in silence from then on. This grace was granted that very 30 The Angelus November - December 2018 evening, to the great joy of the Capuchins who were a bit tired of the noise and the villagers who were beginning to be a bit worried. But Padre Pio’s weak health soon forced him to return to Pietrelcina. The doctors had a hard time finding a diagnosis. One of them even announced he would not last more than a week. He left Pietrelcina again to go to Foggia, where the air did not suit him at all. On July 28, 1916, he was advised to go to San Giovanni Rotondo to rest for a few weeks. He would remain there until his death… Half-alive, he was still enlisted, until they took a closer look. There is a photo from this time of the Capuchin friar as a conscript, wearing a uniform and holding a gun; he had never shot a firearm and looks a bit out of place in the picture. It was during this period that he bilocated for the first time. The Italians had just been severely defeated in Caporetto on October 24, 1917, and the commander-in-chief, General Cardonna, decided to commit suicide; as he was raising his gun, a Capuchin entered his office and persuaded him to change his mind. The general did so, then thanked the good priest and showed him out. He immediately asked his subordinates who the priest they had let in was. No one had seen him go in or out. The general only recognized him in a photograph many years later. A Wound of Love Upon returning to his convent after his time in the military, he received the grace of a wound of love on May 30, 1918. On August 5, he received a transverberation, and on the 20th, the stigmata, with intense pain. But do not be mistaken. As he wrote to Fr. Agostino, his spiritual director, “in comparison with what I suffer in my flesh, the spiritual combats I am undergoing are far worse (…); I am living in a perpetual night…Everything troubles me, and I do not know if I am doing good or evil. I can see that these are not scruples, but the doubt I feel about whether I am pleasing God or not, crushes me.” At first, Padre Pio tried to heal his wounds. It was useless. To hide them. In vain. The pilgrimages to San Giovanni Rotondo began. From 1918 to 1921, the priest’s apostolate grew and the doctors who observed his wounds were convinced of their inexplicable nature. Pope Benedict XV even went so far as to say that “Padre Pio is one of those men God sends to the earth once in a while to convert nations.” The year 1921 changed the course of events. An ecclesiastical conspiracy of corrupt priests living with women and presided over by a bishop who practiced simony was influential in Rome. The bishop of Manfredonia, the diocese the convent of San Giovanni Rotondo belongs to, even claimed he had seen Padre Pio put on perfume and powder and pour nitric acid on his wounds to deepen the stigmata! And the canons of San Giovanni Rotondo, at least some of them, gossiped about the juicy profits the Capuchins were making off their “stigmatist.” The worst is that they were taken seriously. Worried by these episcopal claims and canonical revelations, Rome was wary…of the Capuchins. A difficult period followed for Padre Pio, as the apostolate entrusted to him was little by little taken away. There was even talk of transferring him to another convent. This was enough to stir up the locals, who were determined to keep and defend their “santo.” A rebellion was not far off. Thinking he was going to leave this little village perched on the headland of Gargano, Padre Pio wrote this touching letter, whose final words are now engraved in the crypt where he used to be buried. “I will always remember this generous people in my poor and assiduous prayer, imploring for them peace and prosperity; and as a sign of my affection, being able to do nothing else, I express the desire that as long as my superiors do not object, my bones will be laid to rest in a tranquil corner of this ground.” A Capuchin superior even considered sneaking Padre Pio out in a large barrel on a cart. Obedient, but neither servile nor stupid, the Father Guardian refused this masquerade. Punishments continued to rain down upon the poor priest. On March 23, 1931, the Holy Office forbade him all ministry, any public celebration of Mass and any contact with any Capuchins outside of his convent. After remaining stoic Spirituality when he discovered in the refectory the letter that his brothers had put off revealing to him out of discretion, he burst into tears upon reaching his cell. A good brother who witnessed the scene felt sorry for him, but Padre Pio gave him an answer worthy of that given to the holy women of Jerusalem: he was weeping not for himself but for all the souls that were going to be deprived of graces of conversion. As a recluse, Padre Pio was able to spend time reading. The History of the Church by Rorhbacher and in a single day, the Divine Comedy—paradoxically suffering from headaches upon reaching Paradise. In 1933, the sanctions began to be lifted. Padre Pio resumed his ministry, especially in the confessional, where he regularly spent up to 10 hours a day. Hospital Project The peaceful years passed. In 1940, a sick man if ever there was one, Padre Pio launched the project for what would become the Casa Sollievo della Sofferanza, a large hospital with modern material and eminent doctors. As in all providential undertakings, there was no lack of obstacles, but the hospital was inaugurated in May 1956. It still exists today. At the same time, Padre Pio created prayer groups throughout the entire world mainly thanks to his spiritual sons and daughters that included Freemasons, swindlers, a famous tenor (Gigli) and women of little virtue. Pius XII confided prayer intentions to him, but his death in 1957 opened a new and painful chapter in the life of the Capuchin. Some of his high-ranking brothers showed an anything but religious interest for the enormous sums that passed through his hands. They wanted them for themselves. A “brotherly” conspiracy supported by the authorities of the Order was formed; they even went so far as to put microphones in the Padre’s cell and confessional. The affair was discovered—the priest complained to some of his friends—and the brothers guilty of this far from evangelical surveillance were relieved of their functions and sent to other convents. 32 The Angelus November - December 2018 The end of his life was more peaceful, though still spent in the all-absorbing ministry to souls. Two events in the last few months of his life are worth mentioning. The New Mass promulgated in 1968 was preceded by normative Masses. Padre Pio asked to be allowed to keep the Mass of all time and this permission was granted to him. During the same year, 1968, Paul VI’s encyclical on birth control was promulgated. Padre Pio, with only two months left to live and at the summit of his mystical life, sent a letter to the pope thanking him for this encyclical that caused so much controversy. This second Curé d’Ars felt the end approaching. On the night of September 20 to 21, 1968, fifty years to the day after they appeared, his stigmata disappeared: the skin on his hands became smooth and clean without the mark of a scar. His jubilee of blood was complete. Eternity was approaching, and on the night of September 22 to 23, Padre Pio went to be with his Maker. Archbishop Lefebvre and Padre Pio At the end of the summer in 1967, Archbishop Lefebvre was in Italy and traveled to San Giovanni Rotondo. The meeting was short. Archbishop Lefebvre asked the Padre’s blessing for the upcoming chapter of the Holy Ghost Fathers. The humble Capuchin declined, responding that Archbishop Lefebvre should be the one to bless him. Politeness between saints. These two great men of the Church were very different. One was a priest, the other a Padre Pio accepted with heroic obedience. Archbishop Lefebvre’s case was different. The persecutions came from his determination to keep the Faith and the Mass of all time and his refusal of the conciliar errors and the new liturgy. Motives of Faith presided over these persecutions, that were far more than a matter of discipline or his own person. Archbishop Lefebvre therefore resolved to disobey these injunctions for a higher motive than purely bishop; one experienced many extraordinary phenomena, the other left only the enigmatic memory of a mysterious dream in Dakar. And yet both offer important similarities. Both suffered for the Church through the Church. Both were victims of true persecutions at the hands of the authority, even though this persecution was for very different reasons and they reacted to it very differently. Padre Pio’s persecutions were personal, inspired by the jealousy of dissolute secular priests and the greed of certain Capuchins. These persecutions led to unjust punishments that formal obedience. His Faith was heroic, whereas his obedience would have been nothing but comfortable servility and earthly prudence. Another resemblance is their profound understanding of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Both, one by his very mystical way of celebrating Mass as the road to Calvary, the other by his spirituality centered on the Holy Sacrifice, ceaselessly recalled the sacrificial and expiatory nature of the Mass that the new liturgy hid under a bushel. Both, one by a literally crucified life, the other by his apostolate for the priesthood, recalled the central role of the priest in the work of Redemption. 33 Spirituality The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass The Kyrie and Gloria by Fr. Christopher Danel The Kyrie eleison, that cry for mercy which is to be found in every liturgy of East and West, seems introduced as if to give grander effect to the outburst of joy and praise which succeeds it in the Gloria in excelsis; it is a deepening of our humiliation, that our triumph may be the better felt.—Cardinal Wiseman of liturgical research took place during the time frame spanning the pontificates of Popes Pius IX to Pius XI, including that of Pope St. Pius X. The early years of his work were contemporaneous with the last years in the work of Dom Prosper Guéranger. The English translation of his study appeared in 1902; the original is: Gihr, Nikolaus. Messopfer dogmatisch, liturgish und aszetish erklärt. Herder: Freiburg im Breisgau, 1877. Introduction In this article we examine the Kyrie and Gloria, presenting the work of Monsignor Nicholas Gihr in his fundamental liturgical commentary The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Dogmatically, Liturgically, and Ascetically Explained. Monsignor Gihr was a priest of the Archdiocese of Freiburg in Breisgau whose work 34 The Angelus November - December 2018 The Kyrie eleison After the Introit the priest returns to the middle of the altar and recites the Kyrie eleison (Domine miserere, “Lord, have mercy”), that is, alternately with the acolyte he nine times addresses fervent petitions for mercy to the triune God. The Kyrie is a cry for help of touching humility and simplicity, one proceeding naturally and directly from the heart that is in want, suffering, and distress; hence, we come across it in many parts of the Old and the New Testaments, and formerly it resounded thousands of times from the mouths of the people supplicating God in penitential procession. The Kyrie chant was sung originally in Rome by the clergy and people, later on by two choirs that repeated it alternately until the celebrant gave the sign to cease. The custom of invoking the mercy of God nine consecutive times in the Roman liturgy has been practiced and prescribed since the 11th century. The frequent repetition of the Kyrie denotes in general the ardor, perseverance and importunity with which, impelled by the consciousness of our sinfulness and unworthiness, we implore mercy and assistance; then there is also therein a still higher, mystical, and hidden meaning, wherefore the number three is thrice repeated. The three Divine Persons are separately and consecutively invoked: first, the Father by the Kyrie eleison; then, the Son by the Christe eleison; and, finally, the Holy Ghost by the Kyrie eleison. The invocation of each of the Divine Persons is repeated exactly three times, to signify that with each of the Divine Persons the two others are at least virtually invoked, since by the fact of their mystical indwelling in one another (circuminsessio, perichóresis) all three of the Divine Persons are and live eternally in one another. The Kyrie is the only short Greek prayer in the Mass rite that is now retained. The principal reason for this may be that the common supplication of the people to God for help passed already in the earliest times from the Eastern into the Western Church, in which on account of its frequent use the Kyrie became universally known and loved; hence the reason why this ancient and venerable form of supplication was not translated into Latin. The Kyrie, as an expression of our wants, is never omitted in the celebration of Mass, and has a very appropriate place in its rite. It follows the Introit quite naturally and forms a suitable preparation for the Collect, or for the Gloria. Spirituality The Introit expresses—sometimes in a vein of joy and praise, again in a strain of tender pity, wailing, or humble supplication—such thoughts and sentiments as should principally occupy the soul at the daily celebration of Mass, that is, it serves as an introduction to the special feast or day. At the remembrance of this celebration, we are so overpowered by the conviction of our own unworthiness, weakness and indigence, that our heart is involuntarily compelled to break out into the oft-repeated supplications of the Kyrie, since God’s mercy alone can make us worthy of celebrating the holy mysteries and days in a proper manner. The Gloria After the Kyrie, the Gloria in excelsis Deo not infrequently follows; it is called the great or greater Doxology, because in comparison with the Gloria Patri it contains ampler and fuller praise of the triune God; it is called the Hymn of the Angels, because its opening words were sung by a host of heavenly spirits on the plains of Bethlehem on the night of the birth of Christ. The Gloria is the sublime triumphal chant of redemption, which partly first resounded from the choir of the heavenly hosts, and partly was an outpouring from the heart of the Church: choirs of angels intoned it at the birth of the Savior; the Church, initiated in the mysteries of God, has continued and completed it. On the plains of Bethlehem the heavenly notes of the “Gloria in excelsis” resounded; they pealed forth with the sublimity and power of tones of “thunder”, full and melodious as “the roaring of many waters.” “When God laid the foundation of the earth, the morning stars praised Him in unison, and the angels made a joyful melody” (Job. 38:4-7): but this rejoicing was silenced when man sinned, and all that was saved for man on earth of holy sentiment and disposition, all that accompanied man as the only gleam of light throughout the darkness of ages, was the hope and the desire of a Redeemer. The Savior’s birth was the happy hour that summoned the angels again to rejoice: their hymn of jubilant praise to the Most High resounded on the air of this fallen world, amidst 36 The Angelus November - December 2018 its longing sighs and lament. More quickening and refreshing to a desolate world was that chant of the angels than ever were fast falling raindrops to a parched up earth. What it now needs and desires is all contained in the words: “Glory be to God in the Highest: and on earth peace to men of good will!” (Lk. 2: 14). Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis! Thus do we joyfully sing at the celebration of Mass in unison with the choir of heavenly hosts; for it is at the altar that this joyful message of the angel has its perfect and mysterious fulfilment. There all due honor and the highest glory are rendered unto God; for an infinite person—the God-Man Jesus Christ—debases, humbles and sacrifices Himself to the praise, acknowledgment, and adoration of the Divine Majesty. There is imparted true peace to man; for Christ, by His sacrifice, purchased for us reconciliation, pardon, favor, and happiness. The initial words Gloria Deo et pax hominibus constitute the theme of the entire hymn. The Gloria is a chant of praise, thanksgiving, and petition; for the praise of God is interrupted by thanksgiving and petition, which are likewise acts of adoration and contribute to proclaim the divine glory. Historical Origins The compiler of this ancient hymn, that is, of the part added to the words of the angels, cannot be historically ascertained; only this much is undoubtedly certain, that the Gloria is not of Latin, but of Greek origin, and that it came from the East. The Latin text, therefore, is not the original one, but a somewhat free translation or a rearrangement of the original Greek text, which for good reasons is ascribed to St. Hilary of Poitiers, Doctor of the Church (+366). In the Orient, it was customary in the 3rd century to make use of the great Doxology in the liturgy, but not at the Eucharistic Sacrificial celebration, and only as a morning hymn in the Little Hours of the Divine Office. Even now it is not recited at Mass by the Greeks; but only the words of the Angels without further additions are to be met with in some Oriental Mass liturgies, for instance, in that of St. James, where they are repeated three times. With regard to the insertion of the Gloria into the Roman Mass liturgy, we have only obscure and uncertain accounts. The use of the Gloria was originally and for a long period rather restricted: it served by preference for the expression of Christmas joy and the Easter chant of exultation. Until nearly the close of the 11th century, the rubrics of the Gregorian Sacramentary prevailed, which granted or prescribed the recitation of the Gloria by the bishop on all Sundays and feast days; by the priest, on the contrary, only at Easter. But from that time this privilege of the bishops was extended also to priests. Since the revision of the Missal under Pope St. Pius V (+1572) the following rule holds good: as often as the Te Deum occurs in the Matins of the Office, the Gloria is said in the Mass corresponding to the Office; but if the Ambrosian Hymn is omitted in the Office, then in the Mass of the day the Angels’ Hymn is not to be recited. The Gloria and the Te Deum are enthusiastic, sublime chants of joy and exultation, expressive of festal rejoicing; hence both are omitted on days and in seasons mainly devoted to mourning and penance, or which at least are without a festive character. Liturgical gestures While the priest recites the Gloria, he stands erect at the middle of the altar with hands joined: only a few simple ceremonies are prescribed to emphasize and to give stress to certain particular words of the text. At the words Gloria in excelsis, the priest, without raising his eyes at the time, extends and elevates his hands to the shoulders, thus giving vent to his eagerness, enthusiasm and longing to praise and to magnify God. At Deo he again joins his hands and bows his head profoundly toward the Crucifix on the altar (or toward the Blessed Sacrament when exposed); for “holy and terrible is the name of God” (sanctum et terribile nomen ejus, Ps. 110: 9). This profound inclination of the head is several times repeated, to express the interior acts of adoration (adoramus te), of gratitude (gratias agimus tibi), of petition (suscipe deprecationem nostram), of reverence (Jesu Christe), and to give expression to these acts of homage not merely in words, but also by the body in bowing the head. At the last words of the Gloria the celebrant signs himself with the sign of the Cross, principally to close the sublime hymn in a suitable and worthy manner. But as the sign of the Cross is of itself a symbolical representation of the Trinity, it may also be referred to the glory of the Holy Trinity expressed in the concluding words of the hymn; for the acknowledgment of the three Divine Persons is often, although not always, accompanied with the sign of the Cross. This Hymn of the Angels should be recited and sung with angelic devotion. During it, we should unite in heart and lips with the choirs of the heavenly hosts, who daily assemble around the altar and never grow weary of chanting God’s praise and our happiness, as they once sang at the crib of the new-born Savior. There the blessed spirits themselves sang for us the hymn, to teach us how we should thank the Lord for having raised us up, poor sinful creatures, from the dust, and for having destined us to occupy the thrones of their fallen brethren in the other world, to whom God vouchsafed neither time nor grace for repentance. Conclusion God is in Himself, that is, according to His nature, infinitely glorious, infinitely worthy of glory, absolutely glorious, the uncreated glory itself. This interior, eternally unchangeable and impenetrable glory of God, we must admire, praise, adore; it may also be a subject of gratitude for us, inasmuch as by the perfect love of God, the divine glory becomes in a manner our property and the source of holy joy to us. For this love of benevolence unites us most intimately with God. “He that abideth in charity, abideth in Him” (I Jn. 4:16). 37 St. Mary’s church in Lübeck, Germany, epitomizes north German Brick Gothic and set the standard for about 70 other churches in the Baltic region, making it a building of enormous architectural significance. St. Mary’s Church embodied the towering style of Gothic architecture style using north German brick. It has the tallest brick vault in the world, the height of the central nave being 126 feet. Spirituality Evangelii Praecones Extracts from the Encyclical of Pius XII on the Missions, June 2, 1951 With a view of promoting still more effectively the work of evangelization by our missionaries and to prevent one drop of their sweat and blood from being shed in vain, We should like here to explain briefly the principles and norms that must guide the zeal and activity of Catholic missionaries. First of all, it is to be observed that the person who had been called by God to evangelize distant non-Christian lands, has received a very great and sublime vocation. He consecrates his life to God in order to spread His Kingdom to the farthest ends of the earth. He does not seek what is his, but what is Christ’s. He can apply to himself in a special way those beautiful sayings of St. Paul: “For Christ...we are ambassadors.” [II Cor. 5:20] “Though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh”(II Cor. 10:3). 40 The Angelus November - December 2018 “To the weak I became weak that I might gain the weak” (I Cor. 9:22). He must, therefore, consider the country he is going to evangelize as a second fatherland and love it with due charity. Furthermore, let him not seek any earthly advantage for his own country or religious institute, but rather what may help towards the salvation of souls. Certainly, he should dearly love his fatherland and his Order, but the Church should be loved with a still more ardent devotion. And let him remember that nothing will be to the advantage of his own Order that is detrimental to the good of the Church. Moreover, it is necessary that those who are called to this kind of apostolate should not only get the spiritual and intellectual training that befits ecclesiastical students before going out on the mission field, but should learn in addition those subjects which will be most useful to them when they come to preach the Gospel in foreign lands. Hence they should be given a sound knowledge of languages, especially of those which they will require at some future date. Besides, they should be sufficiently instructed in the sciences of medicine, agriculture, ethnography, history, geography, etc. We are profoundly grieved as We behold these conditions which Our immediate predecessor described with almost prophetic vision verified in many parts of the Far East. There what were most flourishing missions ripe for the harvest, are now, alas, reduced to the direst straits. Would that it were permitted Us to hope that the peoples of Korea and China, who are naturally cultured and honorable and have been renowned from early times for their high standard of civilization, may as soon as possible be freed not only from turbulent factions and wars, but from the inimical doctrine which seeks only the things of earth and scorns the things of Heaven; and, moreover that they may appraise rightly the Christian charity and virtue of foreign missionaries and native priests who strive only to promote the genuine good of the people by their labors and if necessary, by the sacrifice of their lives. We desire to address and exhort in this Encyclical Letter not only missionary priests but also those laymen who “with a great heart and a willing mind” (II Mach. 1:3) collaborate with the missionaries in the ranks of Catholic Action. It can certainly be claimed that the lay cooperation which we today call Catholic action, has existed since the foundation of the Church. Indeed the Apostles and other preachers of the Gospel received no little help from it and the Christian religion thereby made great advances. In this respect Apollo, Lydia, Aquila, Priscilla and Philemon are mentioned by the Apostle of the Gentiles. We have also these words of his to the Philippians: “Yes, and I ask thee, who sharest the yoke so loyally, to take part with them; they have worked for the Gospel at my side, as much as Clement and those other fellow laborers of mine, whose names are recorded in the book of life” (Phil. 4:3). The same conditions which prevailed in the early days of the Church are still to be found in many areas which have been evangelized by missionaries; or at least their peoples suffer disadvantages which had to be left to a future generation to face and remedy. For that reason, it is imperative that the laity should in great numbers enter the serried ranks of Catholic action, and thus cooperate generously, earnestly and diligently with the hierarchy in promoting the apostolate. The work of catechists is assuredly necessary and we wish to give them due praise; yet no less necessary is the industry and skill of those who out of pure charity are ready to help gratuitously the ministers of God in the performance of their duties. Another end remains to be achieved; and We desire that all should fully understand it. The Church from the beginning down to our own time has always followed this wise practice: let not the Gospel on being introduced into any new land destroy or extinguish whatever its people possess that is naturally good, just or beautiful. For the Church, when she calls people to a higher culture and a better way of life, under the inspiration of the Christian religion, does not act like one who recklessly cuts down and uproots a thriving forest. No, she grafts a good scion upon the wild stock that it may bear a crop of more delicious fruit. Although owing to Adam’s fall, human nature is tainted with original sin, yet it has in itself something that is naturally Christian; and this, if illumined by divine delight and nourished by God’s grace, can eventually be changed into true and supernatural virtue. This is the reason why the Catholic Church has neither scorned nor rejected the pagan philosophies. Instead, after freeing them from error and all contamination, she has perfected and completed them by Christian revelation. So likewise the Church has graciously made her own the native art and culture which in some countries is so highly developed. She has carefully encouraged them and has brought them to a point of aesthetic perfection that of themselves they probably would never have attained. By no means has she repressed native customs and traditions but has given them a certain religious significance; she has even transformed their feast days and made them 41 Spirituality serve to commemorate the martyrs and to celebrate mysteries of the Faith... And in the discourse which We gave in 1944 to the directors of the Pontifical Missionary Society, We said: “The herald of the Gospel and messenger of Christ is an apostle. His office does not demand that he transplant European civilization and culture, and no other, to foreign soil, there to take root and propagate itself. His task in dealing with these peoples, who sometimes boast of a very old and highly developed culture of their own, is to teach and form them so that they are ready to accept willingly and in a practical manner the principles of Christian life and morality; principles, I might add, that fit into any culture, provided it be good and sound, and which give that culture greater force in safeguarding human dignity and in gaining human happiness. Catholic inhabitants of missionary countries, although they are first of all citizens of the Kingdom of God and members of His great family, do not for all that cease to be citizens of their earthly fatherland.” We should not like to conclude this Encyclical Letter without addressing Ourselves earnestly to the clergy and all the faithful to express to them particularly Our warm gratitude. We understand that this year also there is a great increase in the generous help and support given by Our children to the missions. Your charity can certainly be employed in no better cause since it is thus destined to propagate the Kingdom of Christ and to bring salvation to so many still outside the Fold. It is the Lord Himself Who “gave...to everyone of them commandment concerning his neighbor”(Ecclus. 17:12). In this connection the warning which We gave in Our Letter to Our beloved son Peter Cardinal Fumasoni Biondi, Prefect of the S. Congregation of Propaganda Fide, on August 9, 1950, We should like to inculcate once again in view of the new danger that now threatens: “Let all the faithful... continue in their determination to support the missions, multiplying their activities on their behalf, ceaselessly praying fervently to God for them, aiding missionaries and providing for their needs as far as they can. The Church is the mystical Body of Christ, in which ‘if one part is suffering, all the rest suffer with it’ (I Cor. 12:26). 42 The Angelus November - December 2018 Hence, since many of these members today are being tortured and maltreated, it is the sacred duty of the faithful to be united with them in a sincere and deep sympathy. In some parts of the missions, the scourge of war has mercilessly razed to the ground churches and mission stations, schools and hospitals. To restore these losses and to reconstruct so many buildings, the whole Catholic world, which has proved its special care for and love of the missions, will generously furnish the necessary help.” Venerable Brethren, you are well aware that almost the whole human race is today allowing itself to be driven into two opposing camps, for Christ or against Christ. The human race is involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue in its salvation by Christ, or in its dire destruction. The preachers of the Gospel are using their talents and energy to extend the Kingdom of Christ; but there are other preachers who, since they profess materialism and reject all hope of eternal happiness, are trying to drag men down to an abject condition. With all the more reason, then, does the Catholic Church, most loving mother of all men, call on all her children to be zealous in helping these intrepid missionaries by their offerings, by prayer and by fostering missionary vocations. In motherly fashion she compels them to wear the livery of tender compassion, and to take part, if not in the actual apostolate, at least by zealous cooperation, and not allow the wish of the most loving Heart of Jesus to remain unrealized, who “came to seek and to save what was lost” (Lk. 19:10). If they help in any way to bring the light and consolations of the Faith to one hearth, let them understand that a Divine force has been thus released, which will keep on growing in momentum throughout the ages. If they help even one candidate for the priesthood, they will fully share in all the future Masses and in all the fruits of sanctity and apostolic works that will be his. Indeed, all the faithful make up one and the same immense family who, as members of the Church militant, suffering and triumphant, share their benefits with one another. There seems to be nothing more apt than the dogma of the “Communion of Saints” for bringing home to the people the utility and importance of the missions. Joy in Suffering The eyewitness account of a Catholic in a Chinese Labor Camp Rose Hu was born on May 4, 1933, in Shanghai, the eighth of nine children. She converted to Catholicism and was baptized on April 17, 1949 just six months prior to China officially becoming Communist. Following her arrest in 1951, Rose spent the next 26 years in Chinese concentration camps under Mao Tse-Tung. After her release in 1982, she was able to tell this story in her own words. Recently translated for an English audience, this is an inspirational story of a young woman’s life in communist China that lead her to the Catholic Faith. She gives her account of Catholics suffering in a Chinese labor camp during the communists’ persecutions in the 1950’s. Her story is highly recommended by Fr. Daniel Couture, SSPX, her spiritual director. This book is filled with the raw, unfiltered thoughts and experiences of a soul who endured much for Christ. What Rose suffered for her Catholic Faith defies belief, demands respect and certainly draws a clear picture of the treatment of Catholics under Communism in China. 288 pp. – Softcover – STK# 8510 – $18.95 Spirituality Gothic Noël by Jehan Le Povremoyne High above the drowsing village stands the Gothic cathedral, its spires pointing to the heavens. In the belltowers the wind murmurs an ancient and plaintive refrain as it did once upon a time over the stable of Bethlehem. The village, at peace beneath a clear night sky and the glittering stars, snuggles against its hillsides and goes to sleep. At the cathedral, only St. Benoit is awake. He watches the lights die out in the twisted alleys where the antique signboards sway in the wind. He listens to the diminishing sounds of life in the town and the vanishing footsteps of vagrants returning from the taverns. And then, sure of not being seen by any human being, St. Benoit steps out of his niche by the grand portal and climbs the facade of the cathedral, hand over hand clinging to the rooted vines, until he reaches the 44 The Angelus November - December 2018 tympan over the main doorway, where stand the sculptured figures of the Biblical prophets and martyrs. “Noah? Isaiah? Abraham?” He calls out, tugs at the hem of a mantle and with his stick prods the sleeping ones. “Noah, it is I, Benoit, Brother Benoit.” “Brother Benoit?” “Yes, from down below, from beside the little doorway.” “Ah yes; well, what do you wish, my brother?” “I wanted to tell you, Noah, it is the eve of Noël. Noël, the feast of the Redemption. The glorious Nativity on earth of the Son of God. Noah?” The mumble of his voice in his white beard is like a breeze in the forest of Ile de France. Amid the sculptured leaves and branches, allelulias seem to echo. “Yes, Benoit,” Noah answers, “I understand. I know. Let us give praise.” “No, not yet. Since Easter of the year 1426, I have been thinking over an idea which I wanted to confide to you. Tell me what you think of it.” And in the ear of Noah—an ear grey with ancient dust—St. Benoit confesses his great project. It must be something magnificent, fantastic, celestial and pious all at once; Noah, gay as the time he drank too much wine, kisses St. Benoit on both stony cheeks, cheeks eroded by the tears of the rain. At the tympan of the Old Testament they awaken the statues; the whole bizarre throng of Genesis, from Adam to Nathanael, arises. And now they make their way along the exterior of the cathedral, along the balconies, under the flying buttresses; from time to time they pause and gaze down from the parapets on the sleeping village below. A rising murmur fills the towers and spires, and vibrates against the stone roses from which the petals fall soundlessly on the parvis; the light folds of the virgins’ draperies flutter. “What is it?” all the Biblical figures whisper. “Why are you awakening us?” All the saints of the New Testament now, the great saints from St. Martin to St. Louis, from the apostles to the most humble monks, have stepped out from their places. They are all different, no one is of the same size or height...there are large ones, lean in their long straight robes, little ones in their mantles and hoods. Some wear crowns, some miters...some are barefoot, others shod in the finest sandals; but they are all very old, very good, very holy—and very beautiful with all the beauty of Gothic sculpture. And amid all this, St. Benoit continues to preach. And the statues are immediately again on the roofs, the galleries, the towers, the tympans and the pillars, in their places of worldly immobility; and their escapade of an eve of Noël would never have been known to man had the poet not read in their ecstatic eyes the miraculous vision of which they dream now until the end of time. And the Franciscans leave the cathedral, climb once more the pillars and the lintels, “up to the highest and most hidden corners, and coax forth the fantastic fauna of the Middle Ages: horses, goats, hippocamps, crabs, scorpions, bulls and the beasts of the Apocalypse, all chiseled with love in the ateliers of the time of St. Louis. The animals descend, tumbling and leaping and cavorting, and under the guidance of the little Brothers, take their places in the majestic nave of the cathedral. The whole of the animal creation is there beside the ox and ass of Bethlehem: sheep, quail, piglets, lions, eagles and all the birds of the islands and the heavens, and all the fish of the oceans and all the creatures of the Gothic imagination. All the sculptures of the cathedral are there, but alas, the Divine Infant does not descend. The angels sing in vain, St. Joseph struggles against drowsiness, the little donkey has cramps in his knees; all the little animals disport themselves like acrobats to divert the mother of God—but Jesus is not reborn. But where is St. Benoit? “Benoit? Benoit?” the saints whisper. Benoit breaks through the crowd. Having put aside his cross and miter of abbot, Benoit lifts up on a fine folded cloth a beautiful smiling child, all glorious, with a globe of the world in one hand and a royal crown on His brow. On both knees before the Virgin, Benoit speaks: “Woman. Woman. Here is your son.” The saints are ecstatic, the apse glorious with supernatural light; the little animals twitter with ineffable joy in the torrent of grace, the Paradise, which descends upon them. But suddenly a volley of bells shakes the cathedral. From the high belfries glistening in the dawn comes the rumble of the huge bells, howling like the ocean, into the overturned vessel where the saints of stone are praying. “The angelus! The angelus!” “My brothers, we are here to find the Holy Mother of God. So be it.” “So be it,” they all mumble after him. “But what do you think of this, Chrysostome? A pretty sermon, but Benoit is making fun of us. Why does he waken us like this after so many centuries?” But St. Benoit does not let himself be intimidated by either the kings or the people—far less by the clergy. Undaunted, he leads the crowd of saints toward the apse. For it is at the apse, 45 Spirituality high on the gable as on the prow of a ship, that the figure of the Virgin Mary stands, Our Lady of the Waves, for the protection of mariners. The saints press forward along the balconies, perch on the arches and on the lead roof; then from the throng arises an exquisite prayer towards the Madonna. Her hands joined, her head crowned, she steps forth from among the stars which sprinkle the velvety drapery of the sky; she listens to them and then smiles. “Merciful Virgin, beautiful Madonna,” St. Benoit chants as the others chorus behind him. “Queen! Queen of the angels!” the cherubs shout enthusiastically... St. Benoit speaks: “Hail, Mary, full of grace. But the Saviour is not with you, and it is the eve of Noël. My brothers and I—we would be so happy if you would—” “That Benoit, would you believe it,” mutters St. Onesiphore. “What audacity!” “If you would, Holy Mother, relive among us the feast of the Nativity.” A great silence falls on the cathedral; all are silent, holding their breath, listening. “Relive the Nativity.” And in answer the Virgin steps down from her flowered pedestal. But St. Benoit stops her as she places one foot on the gutter. He is in command. “This must be done properly,” he says. “You must not go on foot, my lady, we—” “We will carry you,” volunteer the tiny angels who have but the tips of wings on their shoulders. “Angels! Will you do me the kindness of going off to play elsewhere? And just as fast as you can.” St. Benoit climbs up on a broken buttress and then orders: “This way, Old Testament. All the Old Testament, by hierarchic order, naturally. But of course, Adam and Eve first. Please let them move up to the head of the line—the kings next. Then the prophets—hurry up, kings, will you please hurry up. There now, all the Old Testament marches in front. Yes, the angels can play their trumpets—but not too loudly! Don’t play yet, angels! Wait a minute! O Holy Mother, what a lot of trouble!” “Perhaps you would like your friends near you?” simpers St. Pacome. “My friend,” the Virgin says, “I wish only Joseph near to me—” “Oh, St. Joseph!” exclaims St. Benoit. “I forgot all about St. Joseph! Where are you, Joseph? Joseph?” The crowd of statues turns in search of the blessed carpenter. He is not to be found. “St. Exupere, would you go and look for St. Joseph? Tell him that Madame the Virgin asks for him.’’ St. Exupere and his cohorts go off. “The New Testament will follow after Our Mother,” Benoit commands. “The apostles first, yes, the apostles. St. Peter, stand there please, beside your brother. St. Paul—ah, but St. Paul, still preaching? You set a bad example! But no, look now, after the apostles come the martyrs. The popes? The popes? Will your Holinesses please be more cooperative! After the monks— yes, after them.” At this moment there is a stir in the crowd and St. Exupere emerges. “Here is Joseph, long live St. Joseph,” shout the saints. “Where was he?” “Joseph thinks of everything. While we were here fussing futilely, he went to find the only mount which God has glorified on this earth—for the services which he rendered to the Mother and the Son. St. Joseph went to find— And the poor man of Nazareth steps aside; there stands a donkey. Alas, a very little donkey, from the tyrnpan of the flight into Egypt; skinny, low slung, and missing ears and tail. The Virgin smiles at her husband and then at the beast. With her beautiful fine hand of white stone, Our Lady strokes the worn little back; it is still solid enough in its carving, however, to carry the Madonna. And then with infinite precaution, for Mary suddenly feels herself heavy as on the day she left Nazareth, the maidens help her mount the blessed donkey. St. Benoit, hoarse with emotion, announces: “On route for the procession of Noël!” Across the roofs of the old Gothic cathedral, among the marvelous stone lilies and vines, among the treasures worked by men who were artists and artisans who were saints, the wonderful and droll procession of statues advances. See them pass...across the luxuriant flora of stone flowers and rose windows and arabesques... down the stairways of the towers, advancing onto the large square before the cathedral where not even a dog scampers. The nave is soon filled, then the transepts, even the rood loft. The Virgin meanwhile has reached the chapel in the apse, her chapel. On the steps of the high altar the Virgin reposes. Joseph, leaning on his staff, contemplates her, half smiling, half sad. To one side, the little donkey kneels, and at the other an ox from the niche of St. Matthew all gaze upon the open space of blue and gold carpet where Jesus is to be born. The throng of saints presses close to the screen of the choir which the beloved St. John has closed about his mother. The Old Testament and the New Testament await the Nativity, But just then St. Francis in his cowl approaches St. Benoit. “My brother Benoit,’’ he says. “It is not only mankind who should witness the Birth of Our Saviour. Our brothers the beasts would like to rejoice around the Virgin—” 47 Spirituality San Agustín, Florida and the City of God by a Benedictine monk On August 28, 1565 (the feast-day of St. Augustine) Admiral Pedro Menéndez de Aviles arrived on what is now the coast of Florida and celebrated the first Mass on today’s US territory. A few days later on September 8, he founded the Spanish town of San Agustín, Florida. This Catholic settlement was under the protection of Spain whose principal goal was to establish the Faith in its colonies. St. Augustine, a doctor of the Church, was the patron saint of the first Catholic town in the USA. One of his most important works is entitled The City of God. Professor Charles Mathewes compares the first ten books of The City of God to Virgil’s Aeneid: “... in which a man leaves behind his burning wreck of a home, carrying his ancestry on his back, and travels through several different false homes before he reaches 48 The Angelus November - December 2018 his true new home.” Aeneas, with his father on his shoulders and holding his son’s hand, abandoned his home, ruined by war, and sought his father’s homeland. He was homeless with a sense of instability and loss of identity, fleeing destruction and clinging to his family. In a certain way, St. Augustine does this with The City of God. After the sack of Rome in 410, he carries Greco-Roman culture on his shoulders, as a type of ancestry, leaving the cultural ruins of the false gods behind him. He begins his pilgrimage of life, seeking truth and passing through the many false homes of his pagan ancestors. He denounces the false gods of the Greeks and Romans as nothing more than the personification of vices and passions. At one point he exclaims, “...I wish war were not real like Mars is not real...” He shows that Mars and all of the false gods are demons who incite men to commit the atrocities of sin. He definitively rejects the falsehoods of his ancestors and at the same time carries with him his identity as one of them. He is a product of the various qualities of his great predecessors, but is honest enough to reject their obvious errors. The Donatists were a group of rigorists also targeted by St. Augustine. Rejecting the decisions of the Church, they judged that sins committed to avoid martyrdom could not be forgiven by the sacrament of penance. Although they professed this type of exaggerated purity of soul, they soon fell into grave errors. They became closely affiliated with the Circumcellions, which were a group of fanatics that exalted martyrdom as the only true virtue. They were essentially a band of brigands that lived immoral lives of robbery and debauchery. There seems to be a pattern of the extremes that somehow always meet throughout history. The rigorous Jansenists of France became some of the most ruthless of the Revolutionaries attempting to destroy the Church. Our puritan ancestors, finding depravity everywhere, have become the anti-puritans of our day, advocating abortion and same-sex marriage. Modern society bears the fruits of the imbalance found in the extremes of our ancestors. The extremes are never too distant from one another. In The City of God, St. Augustine proposes a balanced solution for the founding of society. Happiness will not be found perfectly here on earth, but we can hope to find it by seeking our true Father in Heaven. St. Augustine’s pilgrimage, like that of Aeneas’, seems to include a small son to show that he hoped in a future generation for his family. St. Benedict, who was also of noble descent, was born near Rome about 50 years after the completion of The City of God. With his monastic Rule he too founded a “City of God.” St. Benedict carried on his shoulders all that was good in the Roman culture and unmercifully rejected all that was evil. His Rule is a beautiful example of the Roman Father of the family, with its hierarchy, respect and love. The balanced moderation in the practice of virtue, the discipline, mercy and justice of his medicinal corrections, the importance of peace of soul and his call to spiritual warfare under the banner of Christ, all of these elements attest to the balanced Roman culture found in his Rule. Like St. Augustine, upon arriving at Monte Cassino, he overthrew the false god Apollo and cut down the sacred groves where sacrifice was offered to mythological gods. He kept all of the good that his ancestors passed on to him, but unmercifully rejected their errors. We are called to do the same thing with our lives. We cannot deny that we carry our ancestry on our shoulders as part of our identity, but like St. Augustine and St. Benedict, we must reject our ancestors’ errors that they passed on to our generation while we preserve their virtues. Our perfect happiness will only be found in Heaven. Amidst the ruins of our modern society, we still hope to find the Fatherland. We must practice the virtues that our forefathers left to us and renounce their vices. Since St. Augustine is the patron of the first Christian town founded in America, we may consider him as our founding father, using his example of hope as our means to enter “The City of God.” 49 Christian Culture A History of Catholic Liberalism Conference by Prof. Luis Roldán, given at La Reja Seminary, Translation by Inés de Erausquin With this conference, we are talking about a type of liberalism which has really become a concrete enemy: Catholic Liberalism. We can say that liberalism in general, as a position in the metaphysical order, is founded mainly on nominalism—the idea that the only reality comes from the individual; which gives its adherents a fundamental problem with understanding a different reality, for example, that of societal groups. But most liberals do not reach a particularly developed understanding of this matter; because they always get stuck in what we can call the primary question, which is the problem of knowledge. Liberalism in general always presents itself as skeptical when it comes to the problem of truth; the proto-liberal is Pilate, who at the trial of Our Lord asked Him, “What is truth?” and then walked away without listening 50 The Angelus November - December 2018 to the answer. The liberal does not believe that man is capable of knowing what things really are. Another challenge comes from relativists, who believe that there is no reality; that reality changes, varies, and is constantly modifying itself. And thus, he who believes that he understands or has a true conception of essential reality, deep down ends up deforming reality. A third variant of liberalism is subjectivity. A subjectivist believes that reality varies according to the individual and what he recognizes, and not the object itself. From this comes the saying, “Each person has his own reality,” or “It all depends on your point of view.” From this fundamental denial of reality and of the idea that man can truly know what things are, liberal anthropology becomes fundamentally individualist. The individual is the only reality. And naturally, when the problem of ethics arises, if there are no objective norms to guide human conduct, the decision of the individual is absolutely the only rule that must be followed. Now in principle, this idea can clearly be sustained as a false theory, but it has great problems when society needs to be built on it. If every man lived like Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, he could do whatever he likes, up to a certain point; but when there is a lot of free, autonomous and sovereign individuals that have to live together, the problem begins to get more complicated. Because of this, in general, political doctrines based on liberalism try to solve this riddle: how men, created free, sovereign and autonomous, can live together. And in truth, they have not yet found the solution to this problem. They have gone from Hobbes’ ideal, in which every man totally renounces his sovereignty into the hands of Leviathan, to the famous “squaringthe-circle” in the Social Contract of Rousseau, in which—by way of the myth of a general will— every man obeys the general will but ends up only obeying himself, enforcing an obligatory freedom. There is also the scheme of Kant, which is a bit more complicated, in which one has to admit that there are limits to liberty because otherwise we cannot even exercise the freedom we have. But these liberal theories, which have been spreading across the world practically since the 17th century, have had a very great influence within the Church, especially since the fundamental happenings of the French Revolution. Until that moment, we can say that the liberal and Catholic positions were clearly separated. This terrible affair, which profoundly affected not only France but Europe and America with its echoes and repercussions, was the first attempt to create a state that directly dispensed with God and religion. Any previous attempts had had quite a few problems. We could say that the first attempts at forming a liberal State came along with Protestantism. But the Protestant attempts—for example, in England—simply consisted of separating the English Church from the Roman Church, and to transform it into a State religion. The King became the supreme authority of the church in England, which is still the case today. In the German states, principally, Protestantism also favored these State religions, not only because of a matter of opportunity, but because of a need that we may say came from Protestantism’s very logic. Protestantism, at the moment that it affirms free interpretation of the Bible as a fundamental point, makes every Protestant, at heart, a follower of his own different religion. They have no Magisterium; there is no authority. Such a state of affairs is all very well in religious matters; but when one has to build a Protestant society, the question becomes more difficult. And so it turned out that in each of these Protestant countries the king would found his own Protestant church, to impede the division of the country into innumerable sects. The United States is the exception to this, but for other reasons. This has happened in Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, etcetera etcetera...It was the French Revolution, however, that brought in the new element of liberalism. Civil Religion A few years later Pius VII signed his famous Concordat with Napoleon. I have already written a great deal about this, and we can’t go over all the details, but basically the first intent of the Revolution was to follow the letter of the Social Contract and create a civil religion. There’s a chapter in Rousseau’s book which goes by very quickly—and in fact in Argentina, in the first translation of his work, printed by Mario Moreno in the Buenos Aires Gazette a little after the 1810 May Revolution (the establishment of the first local government in South America) this chapter on a civil religion is omitted. Moreno said that he suppressed this chapter because “at this point, the author is delirious!” (Really, Rousseau’s entire work is delirious, but well…it was most evident in this chapter, and Moreno suppressed it.) But what exactly does Rousseau say in this chapter? Rousseau has the problem that for the “general will” to work, he has to eliminate every other type of group association among his citizens, other than the State—and why? Because if this does not happen, when people have to 51 Christian Culture vote to determine the content of the general will, they will prefer the ideas of their corporation, of their family, of their group—of their Church. Rousseau saw that in France, at the time, aside from Catholicism there was a Protestant sect of relative importance. So his idea was just this: to create a civil religion that would replace Christianity as the public orthodoxy. This is what was attempted in France firstly by way of the famous Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which failed: an attempt to “organize” the Church, since Catholicism could not be directly suppressed, but in a way that could be directly controlled by the government. This ended up dividing the Church in France; a significant part of the clergy rejected the Constitution, refusing to swear to it; and from this sprang the epic War of the Vendée, in which a great part of the French population sprang to the defense of its priests and bishops who had refused to swear the oath to support the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, and carried on a war against the Revolution for many years. When Napoleon Bonaparte saw how complicated the matter had become, he imposed a change, saying “We must make an accord directly with Rome,” and signed the Concordat with the Pope. This Concordat, though it brought the advantage of the reopening of the churches and the return of public worship in France, nevertheless set the condition that the bishops who had sworn the oath to uphold the Civil Constitution should be recognized by the Holy See. This situation remained after the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Monarchy; and when there was an attempt to return to a stronger Catholic orthodoxy, in the 19th century, it caused a fundamental opposition from the many elements who had accepted the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. And here, for the first time, Catholic Liberalism came to light. At this point arose an important player, a Catholic priest named Felicité de Lamennais, who in many of his works and writings sustained the concept that he summed up in one phrase: “A free State, a free Church.” This is to say, separation of Church and State, but that the Church should have absolute freedom to preach, to give the Sacraments, to assign its ministers, with no intervention from political powers. Lamennais set forth his doctrine; and 52 The Angelus November - December 2018 of course, in his era in which the Popes did their work well, he found himself condemned by Pope Gregory XVI—in the encyclical Mirari Vos, published in 1834. Nevertheless, despite this condemnation, the ideas of Lamennais went on circulating through Europe and all the rest of the world. Later in the 19th century, after the fall of the French monarchy in the revolution of 1848— an era in which there were many political revolutions all over Europe—there was a new resurgence of this Catholic liberalism, principally embodied in the figure of Montalembert, another French thinker. Once again the Chair of Peter challenged them with the magnificent document that was the encyclical Quanta Cura of Pope Pius IX; and with the Syllabus, a collection of modern errors condemned. From that moment, the Syllabus of Errors became the bête noire of Catholic liberalism. In many debates, including in Argentina in the latter half of the 19th century, a common accusation against Catholics was “They defend the Syllabus!”—an insult that few wished to endure. Catholic Legislation The 19th century rolled on and the new Pope, Leo XIII, began to carry out a policy, especially in France, but also in Spain and Argentina, of a certain alliance with the liberal Catholics. This has passed into history under the name of ralliement, a word that is hard to translate exactly but could be translated as “treaty” or “accord.” The idea of Leo XIII was that one must distinguish between the republic, as a political structure, or as a legislation. Thus, he asked Catholics in France to reject the idea of the monarchy as the only possible solution, and to accept in good faith the republican rule, but that they should keep fighting antiCatholic legislation. This is clearly sophism; which is a confusion of the abstract with the concrete. In fact, in Catholic political doctrine, in principle, the form of government is a matter of indifference. There can be a Catholic monarchy, or aristocracy, or republic—or any of these things can be anti-Catholic. But this is purely abstract. Concretely, in each nation, at any definite point in history, there are certain definite political possibilities—and impossibilities. In France at that point of the 19th century, the only possible republic was the Masonic one. To look at a contrary example, in Ireland in the 19th century, the only possible monarchy was the English Protestant monarchy. This concept led, on one hand, to division among Catholics. There were those who continued to defend the Catholic monarchy as the only possible, practical, concrete solution; and those who supported the idea of the Republic. Nevertheless, this policy of Leo XIII was doomed to fail. After the fall of Napoleon III at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, the strongest Jacobin elements—the most revolutionary, Masonic characters—took control of the establishment in France and began instituting a whole series of laws completely contrary to the Church, until in 1905 there finally came the well-known law of complete separation of Church and State. At this stage, St. Pius X was reigning as pope, and seeing the clear problems with the situation, he immediately cut off the policy of alliance and broke completely with the liberal faction. He also condemned the final version of Liberal Catholicism, a movement founded by a thinker named Marc Sagnier, who founded the “furrow” movement—le Sillon. This movement was condemned in a document by St. Pius X which had its hundredth anniversary last year: the document Notre Charge Apostolique, “Our Apostolic Mandate,” in which St. Pius X condemned in a very clear way the errors of liberal Catholicism, that Christian democracy that was so prominent in this era. Moving on into the 20th century, in the 1920s two very important events occurred. In Mexico came the War of the Cristeros—in which the Papal intervention of Pius XI was quite deplorable, because he commanded the Catholics to desist from armed combat, and this led to their finally laying down their weapons and promptly being murdered—with no repercussions—by the Masonic government which had not laid down its weapons. In France came another important event: the condemnation of Action Française and Charles Maurras. Maurras was an interesting thinker who had been a positivist and disciple of Comte; not a Catholic, but a man of good faith who loved his country and who loved truth. His objective study of social conditions convinced him that Catholicism was right. This produced an interesting paradox: at the end of the 19th century, this movement called Action Française, at a center for studies that they ran, there was a summit on the Syllabus, given by a priest whose work was teaching the Syllabus. Maurras commented on the Syllabus that “there is nothing in this document that opposes common sense.” This document, unacceptable to liberal Catholics, was accepted and defended, even promoted by an agnostic! A paradox of history, indeed. Action Française was condemned by Pius XI, and this led to the disappearance, or at least loss of influence, of a political movement that fundamentally questioned the French Republic. This fact was very important because, above and beyond the purely political aspects of the condemnation of Action Française, a sort of internal purge in the Church developed at the same time, purging all those members of the Church that favored or even appeared to favor Action Française. This led to positions of influence in universities, dioceses etcetera, being taken over by those characters that had been, so to speak, in the background because they were suspected of modernism; characters like Henry de Lubac, for example, in the Society of Jesus, were promoted because they were willing to persecute and attack the members of the Action Française. Fr. Calderón lent me a book which I enjoyed very much, by a contemporary author named Philippe Prévost, called L’Eglise et le Ralliement; it gives a very detailed history of this whole process. At this point appeared a very important person in our history, and I believe the most important character of the 20th century by whom to understand liberal Catholicism; this was Jacques Maritain. He is the man who would herald Catholic liberalism at the very heart of the Church and influence profoundly Vatican II. This will be the theme of another talk. 53 The Proto-gospel of James (also known as the Protoevangelium of James) was written around 150-200 A.D. and relates the story of Mary’s own childhood and the nativity of Christ. This text spread throughout the Orient and therefore explains the diffusion of devotion to St. Anne. Devotion to St. Anne spread throughout the Occident, or Western World, thanks to various dealings with the Orient. During the Middle Ages, pilgrims, merchants, and Crusaders travelling to Europe often spoke of and offered prayers to the parents of the Virgin Mary. Devotion was first seen in the south and then spread to the north of Europe. Countless works of art were created and are still found today throughout Europe due to the fervor of this devotion. Settlers, missionaries, and sailors coming from France brought devotion to St. Anne to North America, where it was widely accepted, especially at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, where over 350 years of devotion have already gone by. St. Anne has become the patron saint of the province of Quebec and, as any good grandmother would do, has never stopped “spoiling” her little grandchildren. Statue of St. Anne holding the Blessed Virgin Mary in St. Anne de Beaupre Christian Culture St. Anne de Beaupré by Dr. Marie-France Hilgar At the foot of the Laurentian Mountains on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, the lofty spires of a basilica that attracts over a million pilgrims and tourists a year soar over the small town of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré. Located about 35 kilometers east of Quebec City, it is the site of the oldest shrine in French-speaking North America. For over three centuries, the devout have come here to pray to “Good St. Anne.” Many feel that its impressive mosaics, stained-glass windows, sculptures and carvings make it the loveliest church in Quebec: a temple of beauty, knowledge and worship. Along with Lourdes, Fatima, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Assisi and the shrines of the Holy Land, St. Anne de Beaupré is one of the most important pilgrimage sites in the Christian world. Countless devout pilgrims and captivated 56 The Angelus November - December 2018 sightseers from all over the world have been moved and filled with wonder by the magnificent St. Anne de Beaupré. The third church, which succeeded those built in 1658 and 1661, was constructed in 1676. For two centuries pilgrims came to express their faith, to pray for help and to thank for favors granted. It was demolished in 1878. In 1879, Redemptorists from Belgium completed the construction work that had begun in 1872. Pope Leo XIII raised the church to the rank of a minor basilica in 1887. The succeeding priests devoted themselves to the task of heightening the church’s profile. Inspired by French medieval architecture, the details and semi-circular arches are Romanesque, but the proportions and elevations are Gothic. The new basilica opened in 1934 but the spires were not added until 1962. Its total height is 82 meters. The façade is monumental. St. Anne is seen in the portico tympanum. She invokes God with outstretched arms as she welcomes the pilgrims. We then see the pilgrims in the central portal. One can feel the weight of human suffering bearing down on them: illness mourning, poverty. The statue of the Virgin, one of ten statues decorating the front of the building shows Mary holding Jesus, well swaddled to protect him from the elements, who in turn holds a wooden dove. Over the central doorway, the right hand of the pilgrims’ angel is raised to bless visitors. The concentric archivolts of the great arch frame the rose window in the center of the façade. Farther up, a blind arcade links the two towers, both of which have buttresses. The enormous statue of St. Anne was sculpted from a model of the Miraculous Statue placed in the basilica four years earlier. She is not wearing a crown because the Miraculous Statue had not been crowned yet. The statue is made of coppercovered wood, except for the faces that are covered in lead. Preserved from the flames which had raged around it, this treasure was removed from the ruins of the basilica in on March 29, 1922, the saddest day in the shrine’s history, a fire devoured the basilica, monastery and seminary. September 1922, then installed in the top of the new façade in July 1929. Standing at 13 ft, it is one of the largest wooden statues in Quebec. In just three hours, what the devotion of the people had built in three centuries was destroyed. Alone with Mary in her arms in the forefront, St. Anne braves the weather and the years. In the distance is the Island of Orleans, the jewel of the St. Lawrence 57 Christian Culture River. The church has nine bells weighing from 1050 to 11,935 lbs. The three largest ones are in the north bell tower. The tower closest to the river houses the other six, including the famous pilgrims’ bell which escaped the 1922 fire. Every hour the bells ring out the first few notes of famous hymns to St. Anne. Eight angels are found around the corners of the towers. Inside, the great nave has the three stories typical of Gothic cathedrals: the large arcades, the triforium and the uppermost clerestory windows. The stained-glass depicts saints, including St. Lawrence on the side facing the river of the same name. The triforium arcades are supported by 326 small columns made of diverse types of polychrome marble. The basilica can hold more than 1,500 people. With its marvelous harmony of glass and stone, the basilica’s rose window made up of 37 stained-glass windows, is similar to those of the cathedrals of Chartres and Amiens. The center window shows St. Anne, the Virgin and the Infant Jesus. Around it are 12 worshipping angels and 12 symbols of litanies to the Virgin. The walls of the basilica are made of porous Cordovan stones dotted with fossils. In the nave the pews are adorned by a kind of Noah’s ark with a caribou, a lynx, and hundreds of other animal forms. A different plant and animal is sculpted on the end of each of the 260 oak pews. The pews are also decorated with scallop shells, the pilgrims’ symbol since the Middle Ages. An allegory of envy, one of the seven deadly sins is displayed in the mosaic on the floor of the central aisle. As in the cathedral of NotreDame de Paris, arcades divide the interior into five naves, one larger nave and two pairs of side aisles. All of these are lit by clerestory windows and covered in mosaics of historical and symbolic significance. Twenty-four confessionals line the outside walls. Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem is one of 88 scenes from the life of Jesus carved on the 22 capitals of the columns. The basilica is truly a gospel in stone. At the transept crossing, the four evangelists are carved on the pillars. On the side aisle pillars the 14 Stations of the Cross were carved in Indiana limestone. The importance and emphasis are on Christ. He must always be in the forefront. The 58 The Angelus November - December 2018 resulting bas-reliefs are very discreet although very expressive, especially Christ’s face. There are some 300 stained-glass figures. Millions of pilgrims have knelt down before the Miraculous Statue in the north transept. It is made out of a single block of oak and polychromed and was carved in 1927. The first Miraculous statue which dated from 1881 was destroyed when the temporary basilica burned down in 1926. St. Anne is holding Mary who is wearing a robe decorated with gold lilies, the lily being the symbol of purity. The monolithic column is made of Italian onyx. The ambulatory around the choir opens unto twelve radiating chapels, each of which honors a different saint. From left to right, the chapels of St. Patrick, St. Joseph and St. Benedict. The mosaic scenes depict Abraham’s sacrifice and the miracle of the manna, and the stained-glass windows feature the apostles Bartholomew, Thomas and Andrew. In the ambulatory again, a long band of Byzantine-style mosaics evokes the mystery of the Eucharist. The central scene illustrates the Last Supper. Judas alone is portrayed without halo. St. Patrick’s Chapel is decorated with clover leaves, a vault’s Celtic Cross and the green marble of the altar and columns call the emerald isle to mind. The tryptic on the altar is made of Peruvian mahogany. The Chapel of the Immaculate Conception dedicated to St. Anne’s daughter is in the crypt of the basilica. The low vaults are supported by massive pillars. The lighting and the Marian colors, vivid blue, create a serene, pious atmosphere. The choir and side aisle feature The Presentation in the Temple, painted in 1986. It depicts the high priest Zacharias greeting the young Mary who holds a white lily. She is accompanied by her parents Anne and Joachim. The lovely wooden statue of the Virgin is beautifully framed by the pipes of an organ. There are no less than 178 charming mosaics patterns of different forms of plant and animal life on the sides of the pillars in the chapel. A cast of Michelangelo’s Famous Pieta was used as a model for the 1968 reproduction in Carrara marble. Around the basilica, a Commemorative Chapel was built in 1878 on the foundations of the transept of the church of 1676. Various materials and ornaments as well as the 1788 bell tower were salvaged from the old church and used for the new chapel. The bell tower has a double lantern topped by a weathercock, the cock being a symbol of the triple denial of Peter. Parishioners were buried in the old cemetery adjacent to the chapel from 1670 to the 1930’s. Like Lourdes, St. Anne d’Auray and other pilgrimage sites, St. Anne de Beaupré has a Miraculous Fountain. A spring, which according to tradition has always been there, rushes from the hill into this fountain built in front of the Commemorative Chapel in the 1880’s. Countless sick pilgrims have reported that this phenomenal water had cured them. The statue of St. Anne stands on a very tall column made in granite. The old high altar of the third church was used until 1876. It was exhibited in the Commemorative Chapel from 1878 to 1998. This masterpiece of Québec sculpture is now housed in the St. Anne museum. It was inspired by the altar in the Val-de-Grâce convent in Paris. The altar frontal illustrates the supper at Emmaus with Jesus and two of his disciples. The church of the Scala Santa was built on the hillside in 1891. Along the path leading up to it is the statue of the Immaculate Conception which formerly stood in front of the old basilica. Pilgrims ascend the Holy Stairs on their knees as Jesus did for his trial before Pilate in the praetorium. The original stairs are preserved in Rome. Paintings feature Holy Land scenes. Two of the statue groupings show St. Veronica wiping Christ’s face, and the Ecce Homo sculpture with Pilate presenting Jesus to the crowd. St. Anne de Beaupré Stations of the Cross are one of the finest in Québec. The touching face of Christ at the second Station where he is burdened with the Cross is designed by an artist who studied in Nancy. The Stations are life-sized. They were cast in bronze in France and installed between 1913 and 1945. In 1671, the Hurons became the first Amerindians to take part to a pilgrimage to St. Anne de Beaupré. Others Indian nations soon followed. Sometimes they would set up camp for a few days near the church. Seventy-one Amerindians are buried in the old cemetery: They wanted to be close to the shrine of the saint they referred to as their grandmother. During the French colonial period, pilgrims would arrive in small boats. In 1844, the first steam ship arrived with pilgrims. Others followed, including the Beaupré, built in 1875 at the St. Anne’s wharf. Boat pilgrimages decreased when the railway was built. However, from 1889 to 1977, the “Good St. Anne Train” and the “Little Electric of St. Anne” carried millions of the devout to the shrine. A bus service, introduced in 1959, replaced them. Since French colonial days, a novena has prepared pilgrims for St. Anne’s feast day, on July 26. Doves and balloons are released to mark the special day. After the evening Mass, to the sounds of hymns dedicated to St. Anne and the Virgin, the pilgrims join the traditional torch carrying processions through the grounds of the Basilica and up the hill along the Stations of the Cross. What I personally found most interesting is the Cyclorama of Jerusalem. It has been a notable attraction since 1895. It is one of the most famous cycloramas in the world along with those of Gettysburg, U.S.A. and Waterloo, Belgium. Inside the building, visitors are encircled by a huge pictorial representation that is 45 ft high and 357 ft around. It has a vague Middle Eastern style. The panorama painting shows the city of Jerusalem, Golgotha, the Mount of Olives, the road to Damascus and their surroundings on the day that Jesus was crucified. After conducting painstaking research, a Parisian artist and his assistants spent four years painting all the thousands of details in this amazing work. Working in Munich, they finished it in 1882. Above the ramparts of the Holy City, Pontius Pilate’s residence, the Temple of Jerusalem, and the palaces of the high priests and of Herod can be seen. Visitors to this cyclorama, the only one in Canada, are astonished by its detail and the incredible illusion of depth. 59 Christian Culture The Forgiveness of Offenses by the SSPX Sisters Friday, 4:45 p.m.: Francis, eight years old, arrives home. He puts down his backpack, gives it a kick, and says in anger: “I’ll show Paul on Monday!” “What is it?” asks his mother. “Oh, he treated me like an idiot! At recess, in front of all the boys, he said that I am worthless in dictation and everyone made fun of me! Oh yes, I will get revenge!” His mother listens in silence. She knows her youngest child and his tantrums. Better to be quiet for the moment, because in this state, Francis is not capable of reasonable judgment. That night, at 8:00 p.m., Francis is in bed and is waiting for his mother’s kiss goodnight. She enters the bedroom, sits down on the edge of his bed and tells him gently: Francis, tell me again what happened at 60 The Angelus November - December 2018 recess. The boy, appeased, repeats to her his whole story. “It is true, it was not good on the part of Paul. But I know you! I know you have a good heart! Isn’t it right that you will forgive him?” “Oh no, Mama, I have had enough! This time I cannot forgive him,” exclaims Francis. With a serious and sad demeanor, his mother leaves the bedroom, making a resolution to recite a rosary for this intention, rather than talking to her cousin on the phone for half an hour, as she had planned. The next day at 8:30 p.m., his mother enters Francis’ bedroom, as she is accustomed to do. They pray together an Our Father. After the words: Give us this day our daily bread—his mother interrupts the prayer. “Francis, you do not have the right to continue the prayer, I will finish it alone.” And with much fervor, she says the following words: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Francis is conquered. He understands the lesson…and his mother experiences once again the power of the rosary. Give the Example Dear parents, it is your example that will help your children to practice virtue and forgive injuries. When he makes a mistake, punish him if he merits it, then do not speak of it again. To pardon means to forget, not to go back to the failures that have been repaired. Our Lord Jesus Christ is always ready to forgive. Each time that we enter the confessional, He waits for us with mercy, and if we regret our faults, He never lets us leave without pardon, even if they are the same sins, and even if they are grave sins. Your indulgence will help your children to better understand the mercy of God. A good lesson for children is also to note that their parents pardon each other. Mother waits for her husband for the evening meal that she has prepared with so much love. Father is late coming home and the children see that this annoys their mother, who fears that the meat will be too tough if it is not served at the appointed time. Ten minutes later, Father finally arrives: “Excuse me, Dear, to have made you wait. I had an important project to finish, I completed it as quickly as possible.” He has such a contrite demeanor that his wife bursts out laughing. Every cloud is dispelled. The attitude of parents in regard to disagreeable persons will also help their children to pardon their less congenial comrades. Oh yes, that neighbor who makes fun of you from time to time when you go to Mass…She starts to watch the car drive off with a large ironic smile, and the children start speaking of it animatedly. Their voices get louder, and Father intervenes: “Children, don’t occupy yourselves with gossiping! She is an unhappy woman who lives without God. Let us not judge her, but pray an Our Father for her! The forgiveness of offenses demands a generous heart. “Holy Mary, give us a faithful and generous heart, which forgets no favor and holds no grudge…a great, invincible heart, which no ingratitude can close, and no indifference weary!” 61 44 pp. – Color Softcover – STK# 8724 – $9.95 Half-Life: The Decay of Reality Learn the effects of digital dependence in every part of your life ??????????????????????????????? half-life the decay of reality Angelus Press We live in a digital age but as Catholics we need to understand what that means on a day-today basis. Whether we are trying to be good parents, spouses, or friends this book is vital to stay ahead of the digital dependance epidemic. Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books and music. Miracles and the Laws of Nature by Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX Introduction If God changed the laws of the universe, it would be impossible for us to do science, at least to a large degree. The reason is that, for science to work, scientists have to make two major assumptions: that the laws of the universe are the same throughout the entire universe, and that those laws have not changed over time. The first assumption is necessary for there to be laws of nature; the second assumption is necessary for us to be able to apply laws of nature backwards in time, to model the physical history of the universe. If God changed the laws of nature, He would be an unreasonable God, for He would be at the same time creating humans with reason and creating a universe that confounds their reason. This causes immense problems in theology. Catholics have historically allowed for both theology and science by saying that God does not change the laws of nature, but only suspends them. Protestants and Muslims, however, have tended to create a conflict between and in religion and science by saying that God changes nature’s laws. Let us consider these two views, with their consequences. Catholic Realism and miracles Catholics are instinctively realist in philosophy. Realists are those who accept that the concepts in our minds match up with reality. Specifically, they accept that, corresponding to the notion of “dogness” in the intellect, there is an actually existing principle in the dog Rover 63 Christian Culture panting before me that makes him to be a dog. This principle is called a “nature” or an “essence.” There have to be real natures outside the mind if we are to account for the fact that types of beings exist, groups or species that all have the same behavior, such as dogs and cats and rhododendrons. When we speak of laws of nature, we are really just speaking about the laws of these natures, the laws that hold for the types of being existing outside our mind. What does this have to do with miracles, you may ask? Well, if you accept that individual things have natures, then you must conclude that God cannot change those natures; He can only annihilate them. Take Rover, for example. “Dogness” is his type of being. Say that God wants to change Rover’s “dogness” to “catness.” Because “dogness” is a feature of Rover that pertains to his very being— it’s his type of being—then God would have to change the whole being of Rover to make him into a cat. In other words, there is no direct path from “dogness” to “catness.” To get there, Rover first has to pass from “dogness” to “non-dogness.” In other words, he has to be annihilated, and so not be Rover at all anymore. If you are inclined to wow your friends with your realism, consider bringing this up when the topic of reincarnation comes up at the next cookout. So, if God is not even able to change the laws of nature—since reducing a dog to non-being is not really changing it into something else— would He make use of His power to annihilate in order to work miracles? Would He, for instance, annihilate and re-create things in the universe, or the universe itself, periodically, in order to do some re-configuration in the cosmos? The answer, for the Catholic realist, is “no.” It would be unreasonable for God for annihilate something and then create something else (see the Summa Theologica, I, q. 104, a. 4). It would be even more unreasonable for God to annihilate the universe and then create another universe with different laws of nature. When God works miracles, He is reasonable. This is why Catholic theologians hold that God does not change the laws of nature when He works miracles, and He does not occasionally 64 The Angelus November - December 2018 reconfigure the laws of the universe. It is precisely because God respects what He has created—both His universe and His humans— that He does not do so. What God rather does is suspend the laws of nature, as I explain in The Realist Guide to Religion and Science (p. 103): “It is more correct to say that God suspends the laws of nature when He works a miracle, in that the normal workings of nature do not manifest themselves—not because they have been changed, but because they have been prevented from acting. At the same time God suspends natural laws, He produces an extraordinary effect by means of direct creation or by using a creature already existing as an instrument of His power. Thus, when Jesus cries out, “Lazarus, come forth,” the normal corruptive processes eating away at Lazarus’s body are suspended and God communicates to the voice of the God-man the power to restore life to that same body. The course of nature has been changed, but the laws of nature have not been changed.” In the example given, God: —works a local miracle that does not tamper with the laws of the universe. —changes the course of nature, by stepping into the arena of created causes. This is similar to you changing the course of nature by, for instance, holding a book three feet off of the ground, when normally it would fall to the ground. You are not changing the nature of the book; you are just interfering with its normal mode of operation. —uses the miracle in order to convince human reason of a truth that is not directly accessible to it, namely that Our Lord Jesus Christ is God. He does not use this miracle—or any miracle—to convince humans to mistrust their reason. It is perfectly reasonable for God to teach humans supernatural truths—and so enlighten their intellects—by means of miracles, but it makes no sense for Him to teach them to abandon reason by means of miracles. In summary, the Catholic realist holds that miracles are a suspension of the laws of nature, not a changing of them. This view harmonizes with the idea of a God who is wise and reasonable in all that He does. Theological idealists and miracles Protestants and Muslims tend more to be idealists than realists in philosophy. An idealist starts with theology rather than philosophy in forming his notion of miracles. He begins with an idea of God that is not taken from reality, but is more taken from a pious desire to make sure that God has absolute freedom, that God can will whatever He wants, whenever He wants. Such a theologian is called a “voluntarist.” In order to “give” God total free will, voluntarists have to strip from Him another one of His faculties, His intellect. In other words, they hold that, if God’s will were bound to follow the reasonable dictates of an intellect, then God’s will would not be completely free. To save God from this “restriction,” they make the claim that God does not follow any set ideas in what He does. To take a simple example of this line of thought, let us say that we were wondering if God could create a rock that is too heavy for Him to lift. Theologians holding that God cannot do anything that contradicts reason would say “no.” The God of raw-will theologians, however, would say, “We cannot restrict God’s power and choices by the categories of our human reason. It seems to us that creating a rock too heavy for you to lift is against reason, but our minds are limited. And who are we to put constraints on the choices of God? God forbid that we should dare pretend to impose the limits of our thinking on the action of God!” Thus, they conclude, God must be able to do even those things which seem impossible to reason. God can do anything, even the impossible and contradictory. Certain Catholic theologians, especially William of Ockham, tended in this direction. The Church, however, has never allowed such a theology of God to become mainstream in Catholicism, and, in fact, has fought against it tooth and nail throughout the ages. Meanwhile, such a God idea is standard in Islam and Protestantism. Muslims form their God idea from the Koran. But the Koran presents Allah more as an absolute and even arbitrary ruler than as a consistent and reasonable ruler. In the early Middle Ages, two schools of Muslim theologians were battling on whether the Koran should be interpreted literally in those passages that contradicted reason or whether it could be interpreted allegorically in order to save reason. Ultimately, the literalist and voluntarist school of Al-Ash’ari won out. It projects an image of an Allah who is not subject to reason and so a universe that cannot be fathomed by reason. Effectively, Allah recreates the universe anew at every moment, in such a way that there is no consistency from one moment to the next. This prevents human minds from being able to discern causal connections between events that happen in the flux of time. The only explanation that can be given for anything is, “Allah did it.” Everything is a miracle. The first Protestants, who took Ockham’s system to its ultimate limit, tended to make an Allah out of the God of the Bible. There were several reasons for them to do this: —they held that God does unreasonable things, such as damning people for no fault of their own; —they had a strong dislike for the faculty of reason; —they wanted to turn religion from being something objective to being something subjective. The Protestants did have one major obstacle standing in their way: the very Bible they claimed to understand and honor, a Bible which consistently proclaims God’s consistency and reasonableness. But because the Reformers were voluntarists as theologians, they willingly accorded to God the freedom to be unreasonable and inconsistent. Even more, they made Him into a God who wants to stamp out reason in His creatures. How does He do this? By means of miracles. He starts by creating creatures with reason, then He has them use their reason to investigate the nature that He has created, and finally He tells them (by means of a literal reading of the Bible) that what their reason has discovered is wrong. This puts His creatures in a dilemma: do I accept my reason or my God? 65 Christian Culture The good creatures reject their reason; the bad creatures reject God. For the Reformers, the God of the Bible is of such a nature that He works miracles that contradict the laws of nature in order to teach humans to distrust their reason and place their complete trust in God, a God who gives them reason so that they can then reject it for His glory. The voluntarist God, in short, is a God who intervenes in His universe in such a way as to make it impossible for His creatures to make sense out of it. Miracles are, for Him, not so much a means to help His creatures understand His goodness as to exact a total unreasoning submission to Him. Modern Protestant fundamentalists typically do not go this far. They certainly, however, subscribe to a voluntarist theology, which makes them more anxious to defend God’s ability to be arbitrary than God’s will to be reasonable. Specifically, they attack the principle of uniformitarianism, the fancy name for the assumptions of science stated in the first paragraph of this article, i.e. that the laws of the universe are consistent throughout the universe and throughout time. In place of uniformitarianism, such Protestants, who are labelled with the ambiguous term “creationists,” subscribe to the principle of “Biblical catastrophism.” This is defined as “the doctrine that, at least on the occasions mentioned in Scripture, God has directly intervened in the normal physical processes of the universe, causing significant changes for a time” (Whitcomb & Morris in The Genesis Flood). According to this principle, God sometimes works miracles at the level of the universe itself. But if God has done this, He has, by doing so, removed the possibility of humans engaging in historical sciences, which rely on the assumption of uniformitarianism. This deleterious consequence does not overly disturb the creationists. They are willing to sacrifice the intelligibility of God’s universe in order to cling to a voluntarist notion of God. 66 The Angelus November - December 2018 Conclusion Catholic realists claim that God works miracles by suspending the laws of nature, not by changing them. Such a God corresponds to what reason tells us about reality and about God Himself. Protestant and Muslim idealists claim that God works miracles by changing the laws of nature and by doing all manner of things contradictory to reason. Such a God revels in confounding our reason, because He wants us to surrender reason in His honor. Here, neither miracles are reasonable, nor the God who works them. With the realist God, we are able to have a God Who is reasonable, loving, powerful, and in line with Biblical revelation, while the voluntarist God fails to harmonize reason and Faith. This is strong evidence that the realist God is the real God. Fatherhood & The Family T h e I N T EGRI T Y S e r i e s fatherhood and family 200 pp. – Softcover – STK# 6721 – $9.95 The role of Catholic fatherhood has been diminished in three ways. Firstly, it has become smaller. Fewer things are defined as a father’s distinctive work. Secondly, fatherhood has been devalued. Thirdly, The INTEGRIT Y Series and most importantly, fatherhood has been decultured—stripped of any authoritative social content or definition. Fatherhood f and F family reclaiming the catholic head of the family for our lord jesus christ The question is, What do fathers do? The tragedy of our society is that it can’t answer the question and neither can most Catholics. Forward-thinking Integrity Magazine gives answers. Reclaim Fatherhood as the amazing thing it is and lead your family to Heaven. This book is a must read for current father’s but also for future fathers who want to start their family off right! Keep Learning Keep Growing Keep the Faith O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel; you open and no one can shut; you shut and no one can open: Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. —“O Antiphon” for the Magnificat of December 20th “O Clavis David” Christian Culture by Fr. Juan-Carlos Iscara, SSPX Why do people persist in doing things that can only end in creating an addiction? The first use of any drug—or the performance of a morally disordered action capable of becoming an addiction—usually comes about without much reasoning about motives, and even without having any particular attraction to it. The more usual motives are curiosity for new sensations and experiences, or the thrill of 70 The Angelus November - December 2018 breaking the law, of challenging a prohibition or an authority, or simply due to peer pressure. But the deeper causes of addictions are to be found in what could be called a “pathology of the spirit,” a spiritual malady that pushes the individual towards the addictive substance or behavior. In this sense, addiction is the sign of the profound disturbance of the modern world—the loss of firm criteria for distinguishing between good and evil, the lack of the sense of moral boundaries independent of one’s will. The drug use or a certain behavior is seen as an expression of personal liberty, which seems today to be the overriding value to live by. It is a search for pleasure, which is today equated with happiness. The addiction helps to flee reality, to avoid everyday life and its obligations, which are perceived as unbearable burdens, due to the absence of convincing motivations for life. From the psychological viewpoint, factors such as loneliness, stress, depression and anxiety may trigger any addiction. The addictive drug or behavior provides an escape from suffering, solitude, isolation, loss. In the end, it is a consequence of the break of family structure and bonds, and, more fundamentally, a lack of knowledge of, or intimacy with, God. All these characteristics of this “spiritual malady” might lead also to behaviors other than drug abuse, but which attain similar effects. For example, the practice of extreme sports (skydiving, bungee-jumping, etc.), seeking thrills and emotional “highs” that restore some sense of purpose or meaning to life, giving the sense that one is alive. It could also lead to criminal acts (vandalism, theft, serial or random murders, etc.) that provide either thrills, or a perverted purpose in life, or even a means of escape from daily reality. But it more easily leads to the addiction to social media—allowing the unreality of a virtual world to overflow into real life—by either creating an artificial “society” with which to relate and keep at bay one’s sense of solitude and isolation, or by allowing the creation of an artificial “persona” that compensates for the dull reality of one’s self, for one’s lack of self-esteem, the lack of a sense of personal value 344 pp.–Hardcover–STK# 8343✱–$25.55 The Best of Questions and Answers The best questions and the best answers of 30 years of The Angelus. This will be a family’s heirloom reference book for everyday Catholic living to match the Catholic Faith we believe and the Latin Mass we attend. Over 300 answers classified under 30 subtitles. –– Marriage, Parenting, Family Life and Child Rearing –– Science and Medical Matters –– The Bible and Biblical Matters –– The Trinity, Jesus Christ, The Virgin Mary, Angels, and Saints –– Life After Death –– The Mass and the Liturgy –– Church Practices and Customs –– The SSPX and the Crisis –– The Papacy and the Church Teachings 71 Christian Culture What can we do to protect ourselves and our children from the danger of falling into any of these behavioral addictions? 1 Today, the multiplication of technological devices allowing easy access to the internet— computers, tablets, iPads, smartphones, video games, television, etc.—which has turned it into the instrument of choice for pursuing a myriad of addictive behaviors, such as compulsive gaming, gambling and shopping, pornography viewing, an obsessive dependence on social media, a constant checking of feeds, blogs, news, our online accounts, etc. Such internetmediated addictions will certainly have negative effects on school or job performance, and cause a reduced involvement with family or friends, a loss of interest in other hobbies or pursuits, and also feelings of anxiety or depression when not engaging in those addictive behaviors. We must remember that, although we all can be affected, our young are the most vulnerable, not only because they are still in the process of formation and maturation, but also because they have grown in a world dominated by these technologies—indeed, for many of their peers the relationships developed online are more real than their daily, face to face contacts… How can we bring the use of these devices—and the internet—under control? The computer must be in a shared area of the house—never in an isolated room. In that way, it would be easy to know who uses it, for what and for how long. Such lack of “privacy” would be a 72 The Angelus November - December 2018 good deterrent for any improper use. Nothing is less apt to foster virtue than to distribute wireless internet access throughout the house, as it would be easy for our children to access the internet by their own phones, borrowing ours or that of a friend invited to the house...and one time or another such use will be for evil. Limit the time and purpose of use. We must not let our time to be absorbed by these devices, and learn to turn it on for a specified amount of time only. When we use one of these devices, we have to ask ourselves whether or not it is necessary at this precise moment. As in any human behavior where passion could dominate, we have to have a true spirit of penance, and so we need to restrict ourselves in certain things. In childhood, up to 12 years old, there is no legitimate reason to let a child spend time in front of a computer. A game—a game in reality, if possible outdoors—is the normal process of awakening to the world around him. In the slightly older years, computer access should only be an initiation to what is useful, like word processing or working with photographs. But even these experiences should not be prolonged outside of the effective and attentive presence of parents. Restrict the kind of devices to which your children may have access. If a child has its own smartphone or tablet, it should not be a surprise that they access films or doubtful games behind their parents’ backs! But what can we do when we have to use the computer? Not only the young, but also adults of every age are faced with the necessary use of these devices, either for work or study, and must therefore have good sense and be honest with themselves in a number of domains. First of all, it is imperative to establish some practical measures to help us to remain in the straight and narrow path of legitimate use of these technologies: Set limits of time for this use. Follow a daily routine. Set limits to the purpose of use—business, job, study, email, search for information needed, some shopping. Don’t use it for “recreational” purposes. Keep away from “social networks.” If searching for information, once you have found it, make a printout of it, to break your dependence on the computer screen and, at the same time, avoid drifting to side issues, other pages, that will only serve to distract you from your original purpose. Ask family and friends to help you in keeping the limits you have fixed, dragging you away from the computer if need be. For greater moral safety, give your passwords to a family member or a friend. But we also need to discipline ourselves at a deeper level, questioning ourselves about the vigilance required for our moral and spiritual life. How should I use this device in a way that keeps my intellect open to true reasoning and efforts for understanding? How can I maintain perspective through natural means in order to retain my freedom of judgment? What should I do to keep from sliding into intellectual laziness and the neglect of books and culture? What rules should I give myself so as to keep to the realm of the strictly useful, and foster genuine, balanced relations with family and friends? Are there changes I have to make, to keep away from certain occasions of sin? Concerning a duty of state either omitted, or performed in a scattered way; huge amounts of time lost; too much time given to leisure Concerning relationships that could be a danger for me; Concerning the damage I could do (or accept to see done) to the reputation of others; Concerning the life of the family, which may be weakened or compromised; Concerning the virtue of purity; Concerning the neglect of the spiritual life. Only if we have this discipline of life can we then take advantage of the enormous progress in technology, whether for our job or to help wage the counter-revolution. That healthy use of technology is only possible if our soul is trained to the spiritual combat. If not, it is in danger of being swept away in the torrent of mindlessness and of disordered passions. Without a genuine deepening of the interior life, deviations will continue to invade our life. Let us impose silence on ourselves, moments of solitude, of reading, of reflection; let us return to reality! Let us give time to God. 1 For this question, the author is indebted to, and highly recommends, Fr. Jean-Pierre Boubée, SSPX, Half-Life: The Decay of Reality (Kansas City, MO: Angelus Press, 2018), available from Angelus Press. 73 News from Tradition McCarrick’s Resignation Was Only The Beginning As was reported in this space in the previous issue of The Angelus, retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick presented his resignation from the College of Cardinals to Pope Francis following many substantiated reports of homosexual abuse of teenage minors, seminarians and even priests. Unknown at the time was the firestorm the findings against McCarrick would unleash both in the United States and reaching all the way to the Vatican. Within weeks of the McCarrick resignation, the Attorney General for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania released an over 800 page report containing the findings of a special grand jury convened to investigate reports of sexual abuse in 8 of the State’s Catholic dioceses (the Archdiocese of Philadelphia was not included in the report as it had been the subject of a full investigation a number of years ago). The report was notable in that it exposed the malfeasance of many of the bishops in not removing priests who abused minors from ministry. Additionally, the report indicated that 80% of the abuses committed were against post-pubescent males—a fact which the mainstream media (both Catholic and secular) tried to ignore. The diocese of Pittsburgh accounted for the majority of abuse cases and the report specifically cited the malfeasance of the former bishop Donald Wuerl (now the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, D.C.) in his handling of reports of abuse. Soon after the release of the Pennsylvania report, calls for Wuerl’s resignation as Archbishop of Washington became numerous, especially after his denial of knowing anything about accusations of abuse against McCarrick. Wuerl, who is now 78 years old, had submitted his resignation to 74 The Angelus November - December 2018 Pope Francis when he turned 75 as is required by Canon Law, but Pope Francis has yet to accept his resignation. Wuerl was McCarrick’s hand picked successor as Archbishop of Washington and long seen as a protegé of McCarrick. As these events unfolded, a few bishops in the United States issued statements which correctly identified the real cause of the current crisis: active homosexual bishops and priests, and those who cover up for them. First to state the problem was the bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, Robert Morlino. In a letter to the faithful of his diocese dated August 18th, the bishop stated: “For my part—and I know I am not alone—I am tired of this. I am tired of people being hurt, gravely hurt! I am tired of the obfuscation of truth. I am tired of sin. And, as one who has tried—despite my many imperfections—to lay down my life for Christ and His Church, I am tired of the regular violation of sacred duties by those entrusted with immense responsibility from the Lord for the care of His people...Faced with stories of the depravity of sinners within the Church, I have been tempted to despair. And why? The reality of sin—even sin in the Church—is nothing new. We are a Church made of sinners, but we are sinners called to sanctity. So what is new? What is new is the seeming acceptance of sin by some in the Church, and the apparent efforts to cover up sin by them and others. Unless and until we take seriously our call to sanctity, we, as an institution and as individuals, will continue to suffer the “wages of sin.” For too long we have diminished the reality of sin—we have refused to call a sin a sin—and we have excused sin in the name of a mistaken notion of mercy. In our efforts to be open to the world we have become all too-willing to abandon the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In order to avoid causing offense, we offer to ourselves and to others niceties and human consolation...But to be clear, in the specific situations at hand, we are talking about deviant sexual—almost exclusively homosexual—acts by clerics. We’re also talking about homosexual propositions and abuses against seminarians and young priests by powerful priests, bishops, and cardinals. We are talking about acts and actions which are not only in violation of the sacred promises made by some, in short, sacrilege, but also are in violation of the natural moral law for all. To call it anything else would be deceitful and would only ignore the problem further...It is time to admit that there is a homosexual subculture within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church that is wreaking great devastation in the vineyard of the Lord. The Church’s teaching is clear that the homosexual inclination is not in itself sinful, but it is intrinsically disordered in a way that renders any man stably afflicted by it unfit to be a priest. And the decision to act upon this disordered inclination is a sin so grave that it cries out to Heaven for vengeance, especially when it involves preying upon the young or the vulnerable” (http://www. madisoncatholicherald.org/bishopsletters/7730letter-scandal.html). Following upon the publication of the Pennsylvania grand jury report, a number of State Attorney Generals have begun the process to empower similar grand jury investigations. The list includes New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico and Kentucky. Because of concern of the extent of the cover up by bishops, there have been calls for U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to open a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of the Catholic Church in the United States. RICO allows the leaders of a syndicate to be tried for the crimes they ordered others to do or assisted them in doing. The opening of a federal investigation under the RICO Act could see bishops arrested, tried and imprisoned for their cover up and open the dioceses in the United States to financial penalties as well. The real bombshell exploded in early September when Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, issued a 10-page testimony concerning the McCarrick case which, among other things, stated that Pope Benedict had imposed on McCarrick sanctions similar to those now imposed on him by Pope Francis: the cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living; he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance in 2006. Additionally, Archbishop Viganò named those who had protected McCarrick through the years and noted that he was promoted to the Archdiocese of Washington and made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II despite the Vatican being aware of his sexual abuse of his own seminarians and priests. The testimony also stated that Pope Francis had lifted the sanctions imposed by Benedict XVI, brought McCarrick into his inner circle of advisors and promoted other of McCarrick’s protagés (Joseph Tobin who became the Cardinal Archbishop of Newark, N.J. and Kevin Farrell who became Prefect of the Dicastery for the Laity, Family and Life and a cardinal). After exposing these facts, the Archbishop made it clear that Pope Francis was well aware of McCarrick’s abuse, but made him a trusted advisor none the less. Following the publication of Archbishop Viganò’s testimony, a number of bishops and priests have confirmed the truthfulness of his statements. When questioned by a reporter about the revelations, Pope Francis replied: “I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and all those who are interested. Read the statement carefully and make your own judgment. I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions. It’s an act of faith. When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may speak. But, I would like your professional maturity to do the work for you. It will be good for you.” That’s good. Since this statement by the pope, there have been many calls for a complete investigation into Archbishop Viganò’s claims. As for this writing, the Vatican has promised to issue a statement regarding Archbishop Viganò’s testimony “in the near future.” Also, after a meeting with Cardinal Daniel DiNardo (President of the U.S. National Conference of Catholic Bishops), 75 News from Tradition Pope Francis announced that there would be an investigation into the McCarrick affair (though no specifics were included in the announcement) and that there would be a meeting of the Presidents of all the Episcopal Conferences in Rome during February, 2019 to discuss the “abuse crisis.” Pope Francis’ Homily on September 11, 2018 In what has become standard operating procedure when faced with legitimate questions or concerns, Pope Francis used his homily at his daily Mass to attack his critics circumspectly. He stated the following concerning the current crisis unfolding regarding bishops covering up homosexual abuse: “In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ has been unchained and is attacking bishops. True, we are all sinners, we bishops. He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people. The ‘Great Accuser’, as he himself says to God in the first chapter of the Book of Job, ‘roams the earth looking for someone to accuse’. A bishop’s strength against the ‘Great Accuser’ is prayer, that of Jesus and his own, and the humility of being chosen and remaining close to the people of God, without seeking an aristocratic life that removes this unction. Let us pray, today, for our bishops: for me, for those who are here, and for all the bishops throughout the world.” From his words, it is clear that Francis is continuing to try and put forward the “party line” first put forward by the Vatican public relations team: that the current situation is the result of clericalism (“aristocratic life”). Cardinal Blase Cupich, the Archbishop of Chicago and Pope Francis sycophant, tried to peddle the same drivel in an interview by saying that the root cause of the problem isn’t homosexuality, but rather clericalism (Cupich was roundly mocked for this as well as for stating that the pope has more important items to get on with in his agenda and that the Viganò testimony was a rabbit hole). Although he does not mention Archbishop Viganò by name, it is quite easy to infer from his words that Pope Francis is equating him with the “Great Accuser.” Pope Francis seems to miss the point that the only bishops who are currently under attack are those who either participate in homosexuality or cover up for those who do. He is correct, however, in his call to pray for bishops and particularly for himself—that they turn from their evil ways and become the shepherds Our Lord wants for His Church. Pope Francis at Mass on September 11, 2018 Process of Canonization Opened for Fr. Pedro Arrupe At a meeting of Jesuits taking place in the city of Bilbao, Spain, the current Superior General of the Jesuits Fr. Arturo Sosa announced that the Cardinal Vicar for Rome, Angelo de Donatis, approved the opening of the cause for canonization of former Superior General, Fr. Pedro Arrupe. Father Arrupe served as superior general of the 76 The Angelus November - December 2018 Society of Jesus from 1965 to 1983. He was born in 1907, and entered the Jesuits in 1927. After the Jesuits were expelled from Spain in 1932, Father Arrupe studied for the priesthood in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States and was ordained in 1936. In 1958, he was appointed superior of the Jesuit province in Japan. On May 22, 1965, the 31st General Congregation of the Society of Jesus elected Arrupe the new Jesuit superior general. He remained superior general until resigning in 1981 following a stroke. Under Arrupe’s leadership, the Jesuits began to embrace social justice as the center piece of the Ignatian charism (i.e., the Rule written by St. Ignatius Loyola for the Jesuits). This saw an increase in political activity of Jesuits, particularly in Central and South America with a concomitant embracing of Liberation Theology and Communism. At the time of Arrupe’s election as superior general, the Jesuits were the largest Catholic religious order in the world at the time, numbering some 36,000 priests. At the time of his resignation in 1981, the number had declined to approximately 19,000 priests and as of 2013 the number was down still further to about 13,000. Given the collapse of the number of members of the order and the “reorientation” of the Ignatian charism which caused many members to embrace decidedly anti Catholic positions, it is hard to imagine that Fr. Arrupe’s cause for canonization is even being considered. Unfortunately, with the current pope being a Jesuit, it is quite likely that Pedro Arrupe will take his place with the other heroes of the post Vatican II era. 77 136 pp. – Color Softcover – STK# 8725 – $12.55 The Rosary With Archbishop Lefebvre Collection of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s own words on the power of the rosary. Looking for a way to grow your devotion to the rosary? Understanding it on a deeper level is key! Mary is the source of our devotion, the Mother of God and our Consolation through every stage of our life. “Let us ask the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to give us this love that she so admired in her Son Jesus.” — Archbishop Lefebvre on the Joyful Mysteries The Second Vatican Council’s Confusing Counsel on Human Dignity by Professor Hren Dubious Consciousness of Contemporary Man The modern doctrine on the Dignitatis Humanae, or dignity of man has encouraged and even ensured the laïcité, or secularization of the political sphere. The Second Vatican Council’s Dignatis Humanae at first approaches this doctrine in a descriptive manner, noting that “A sense of the dignity of the human person has been impressing itself more and more deeply on the consciousness of contemporary man, and the demand is increasingly made that men should act on their own judgment, enjoying and making use of a responsible freedom, not driven by coercion but motivated by a sense of duty.” Dignity, the document goes on to suggest, demands that the powers of government do not encroach upon the rightful freedom of persons and associations. Dignity, therefore, demands constitutional limits, and other laws ensuring freedom—particularly the free quest for “values proper to the human spirit.” By the end of its very first paragraph, however, Dignitatis Humanae moves from description to condonation: “This Vatican Council takes careful note of these desires in the minds of men. It proposes to declare them to be greatly in accord with truth and justice.” The Council, Dignitatis proclaims, will search “sacred tradition” and doctrine to bring forth things that will harmonize the Church with this developing consciousness of human dignity. We shall see that this attempt at harmonization has left the Church with only a hull of that deep dignity which the rational, political, and eternal nature of man demands. Man has crippled himself through this contemporary consciousness, and is now kept barely alive in a field hospital of the Secular State. Treatment after treatment has only made its illness increase. The Church must again proclaim a definition of man that does justice to human 79 Theological Studies dignity, which in a large part, means giving God His just dues. Divine Revelation of Dignity When Dignitatis Humanae searches the treasury of the Church it seems to find very little that accords with “contemporary man’s” sense of human dignity. The document argues that human dignity is known “through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.” Human beings have dignity, it goes on, because they “are endowed with reason and free will,” capacities that obligate the search for truth. But, and here Dignitatis proffers premises straight from the dense pages of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, men cannot undertake the search “in a manner in keeping with their own nature unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom.” Thus, again, we see an intrinsic link between dignity and liberty. As yet, however, though we have been given a tacit Kantian emphasis on self-determination, we have not been shown with any clarity the link between sacred tradition and doctrine and contemporary man’s sense of human dignity. In addition, we learn that the demands that have developed on account of “the dignity of the human person ...are fully known to human reason through centuries of experience.” Importantly, Dignitatis goes on to insist that the “doctrine of freedom has roots in divine revelation.” In the very next sentence, though, we read that “Revelation does not indeed affirm in so many words the right of man to immunity from external coercion in matters religious” but it does “disclose the dignity of the human person in its full dimensions.” This disclosure takes the form of Christ’s respect for the freedom with which mankind must come to belief in God. At last, then, the document gives us divine revelation’s full disclosure of the dignity of the human person. First, one of Catholic doctrine’s major tenets is that man’s response to God must be reasonable and free. Second, Christ came in meekness, refusing “to be a political messiah, ruling by force.” Finally, his Apostles strove to convert not by coercion, but through the power of the word of God. Considering all of this, in supporting “the principle of religious freedom as befitting the dignity of man,” the Church is merely being faithful “to the truth of the Gospel.” At this point in the document, however, the authors seem to make a dubious claim concerning 80 The Angelus November - December 2018 the consonance between the deepening consciousness of contemporary man and divine revelation. For, because “the leaven of the Gospel has long been about its quiet work in the minds of men to...it is due in great measure the fact that...in the course of time men have come more widely to recognize their dignity as persons, and the conviction has grown stronger that the person in society is to be kept free from all manner of coercion in matters religious.” Contemporary Dignity, Kantian Conscience It is most correct to trace the origins of “contemporary dignity” not to the leaven of the Gospel, but to the Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant. Pierre Manent, in his A World Beyond Politics? writes that, “If for Thomas Aquinas human dignity consists in freely obeying the natural and divine law, for Kant it consists in obeying the law that human beings give to themselves.” The Catholic tradition, then, argues any human dignity that exists comes as given, as a gift, from God—for only God is capable of granting them power to follow their own counsel. For Kant, “the difference is both radical and subtle, to be human is a dignity.” Kant famously taught that human beings can never be instrumentalized, which is to say we can never treat another human person as means to accomplish an aim outside of or beyond that person. A human person, Kant claims, is an end in and of himself. Humanity “alone has dignity,” Kant contends, because humanity alone is capable of autonomy—the ability to choose our own actions. In other words, for Kant, humans have dignity not because they are made in God’s image, but because they are incarnations of autonomy. For Kant, as for Dignitatis, a person’s dignity is manifest only insofar as that person is self-determining; he must be independent of the mere natural causal order. Kant names this negative freedom. In addition, one has dignity only insofar as he is his own master; only when the will is a law unto itself is it selfdetermining. In a remarkable passage, Kant writes that when, in freedom, man determines his own moral ideals, we can see that “a human being is indeed unholy enough but the humanity in his person must be holy to him.” Dignity easily devolves into deification. The Dumb Ox’s Dignity Although St. Thomas Aquinas is careful to qualify Boethius’ definition of “person,” he agrees with the latter’s definition of a person as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” By nature, a person has powers of intellect, self-movement, and choice. According to this initial definition, then, though we can make very real and important distinctions between the two, Aquinas’ rational person is not incongruous with Kant’s exploration of the nature of human dignity. However, Aquinas does not stop here, and what he adds to this initial definition of human nature places the Catholic understanding of the person out of Kant’s reach—and into the hands of God. He writes, “Now it is manifest that in man there is some likeness to God, copied from God as from an exemplar; yet this likeness is not one of equality, for such an exemplar infinitely excels its copy. Therefore, there is in man a likeness to God; not, indeed, a perfect likeness, but imperfect.” Man does not have dignity as man. We might say that man has dignity as imago Dei, but, as Aquinas’ exigencies enunciate, this is not a cause for gloating, as the likeness is imperfect to the point that God’s nature infinitely excels ours. We find other contingencies. For Kant, man’s dignity depends upon his autonomy and self-determination. For Aquinas, man’s dignity depends upon his telos, his natural end, which is union with God. It is in this end, not in his self-mastery, that human dignity finds its fulfillment. Gaudium’s Corrective? Under the heading “The Dignity of Man,” Gaudium et spes strives to root human dignity in God, noting that “man was created ‘to the image of God,’” and thus “is capable of knowing and loving his Creator.” Gaudium et spes goes even further, insisting that “The Church holds that the recognition of God is in no way hostile to man’s dignity, since this dignity is rooted and perfected in God. For man was made an intelligent and free member of society by God Who created him, but even more important, he is called as a son to commune with God and share in His happiness.” Indeed, the pastoral constitution makes an even bolder proclamation, one that at first glance seems to be a direct repudiation of Kant’s conception of dignity: “In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience.” Whereas for Kant’s man’s dignity necessitates that he only obeys laws which he himself authors, the conscience in the heart of man is “a law written by God; to obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged.” Here again Gaudium et spes seems to make important strides in distinguishing Catholic dignity from the dignity of “contemporary man” which finds its most intelligible expression in Kant. To obey God is the very dignity of man. Regretfully, this would be a misreading. What the pastoral constitution says is that the dignity of man is found in obedience to conscience. This distinction may seem to be minor, but upon it we see drawn a rift that has torn the Church from within. Modernism’s Bad Faith in Man’s Conscience If we search for other uses of the word “conscience” in Gaudium et spes, a number of instances would seem to be occasion for grave concern. Consider the following: In the conscience of many arises an increasing concern that the rights of minorities be recognized, without any neglect for their duties toward the political community. In addition, there is a steadily growing respect for men of other opinions or other religions. And elsewhere, in regard to war: Man’s conscience itself gives ever more emphatic voice to these principles... As in the first paragraph of Dignitatis Humanae, the voice sounds somewhat descriptive, as though the constitution is simply documenting the shifting opinions of our times. And yet there is no subsequent language which distinguishes this description from the Church’s own proclamation on the matter. For this reason, it would be easily to read the passage as favorably applauding such a “development of conscience.” Further, here we see the curious use of the singular “conscience of many.” The ambiguous, sometimes painfully dubious language of Dignitatis cast back upon the far more lucid language of Pope St. Pius X’s Pascendi, in which he writes that, for the Modernists, the Church is “the product of the collective conscience, that is to say of the society of individual consciences which by virtue of the principle of vital permanence, all depend on one first believer, who for Catholics is Christ.” The passage from Gaudium, appealing to the singular “conscience of many,” seems similar to the Modernist collective conscience. Elsewhere, Pope St. Pius X clarifies that, for the Modernists, “All Christian consciences were, they affirm, in a manner virtually included in the conscience of Christ as the plant is included in the seed.” The Modernist remaking of Christ, then, elevates the importance of his conscience, and, 81 Theological Studies by extension, the consciences of Christians. This increase in the value of interior conscience has stunning ramifications for the external magisterium, which, for the Modernist, springs “from the individual consciences and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit.” From this premise “it follows that the ecclesiastical magisterium must be subordinate to them, and should therefore take democratic forms.” Indeed, were the magisterium to “prevent individual consciences from revealing freely and openly the impulses they feel,” or to protect dogmas from their “necessary evolution”—such would be, for the Modernist, a grave abuse of power. Although, then, Gaudium et Spes does root its understanding of conscience in the law of God written on the human heart, it nonetheless includes indefinite passages on conscience that leave abundant room for Modernist interpretations. Further, in positing the very dignity of man in his conscience, the constitution offers a reductive analysis of the dignity of man. Yes, elsewhere Gaudium says “The root reason for human dignity lies in man’s call to communion with God,” but it would be easy to conclude, based on the tenor and tenets of the constitution, that this communion comes through conscience above all else, or at least to the neglect of submission to external laws formed by right reason and due obedience to the magisterium. In Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Pope St. Pius X observes that for the Modernist “every phenomenon of conscience proceeds from man as man. The rigorous conclusion from this is the identity of man with God.” I do not wish to contend that the understanding of the dignity of man, and the attendant understanding of conscience that the aforementioned Vatican II documents include are outright collusions with Modernism. It is clear, however, that these documents contain stunning points of continuity with both Kantian and Modernist doctrines. It seems, in fact, that at the very least the aforementioned documents of the Second Vatican Council give evidence of a certain capitulation to the trends of Kantianism and Modernism, which have as their end an atheistic humanism. Religious Freedom Dignified St. Thomas’ delineation of the dignity of man does justice to the human person as God created him. For man is an image whose Exemplar ever enunciates 82 The Angelus November - December 2018 the fact that man’s dignity is contingent upon his submission to rightly ordered civil laws as well as the magisterium of the Church, through whom He will find salvation. Remember that, for Aquinas, human dignity consists of man’s intellectual nature, his ability to choose, and his final end, which is union with God. Out of the first two parts we can deduce that, in addition to conscience, man’s dignity can only be fulfilled insofar as he can promulgate and obey laws that are in accordance with both reason and the eternal law. In this way, the limited dignity which man can enact in the limited sphere of “religious freedom” as outlined in Dignitatis Humanae is made clear. For, as Pope Leo XIII wrote in Libertas Humana, “The true liberty of human society does not consist in every man doing what he pleases, for this would simply end in turmoil and confusion, and bring on the overthrow of the State: but rather in this, that through the injunctions of the civil law all may more easily conform to the prescriptions of the eternal law.” In practice if not in proclamation, “Contemporary man’s” consciousness of his own dignity has led him to identify Man, on the throne of the Secular State, as Emperor of the Earth. Desperate and embarrassed efforts to preserve religious freedom may indeed result in some practical goods, even in civil laws which accord with the eternal. But a hermeneutic of continuity that searches the Church’s magisterium over the centuries provides us with the only relation between Church and State which will ensure both the Kingship of Christ and the dignity of man. Pope St. Pius X makes this clear in his encyclical Vehementer Nos, where he indicates that the separation of State and Church is not a prerequisite for human dignity. “That the State must be separated from the Church” as “absolutely false, a most pernicious error.” Pope St. Pius X knows not to hope that men of good will might be able to preserve human society with laws that they dictate to themselves in full freedom. He shows us that “the principle that the State must not recognize any religious cult,” is “guilty of a great injustice to God; for the Creator of man is also the Founder of human societies, and preserves their existence as He preserves our own.” God, not Man, is the Founder of human societies, and thus—and are we not witnessing this in our times?—the State that tries to preserve itself by its own pretensions to self-derived authority and power inevitably contains within itself the seeds of its own poisonous flowering. Further, this “obvious negation of the supernatural order” strips man of his deepest dignity, whatever the consciences our consciousness of contemporary man may claim. For subjection of Church to the State, the seemingly inevitable result of the aforementioned separation, “limits the action of the State to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only.” In place of “eternal happiness,” which is man’s ultimate object, and the only destiny that grants him true dignity, the separated State limits its action “to the pursuit of public prosperity during this life only.” religious freedom? For although Dignitatis Humanae’s protections of man’s singularly contemporary dignity were purportedly designed to foster his free pursuit of truth, in practice the social order premised upon this dignity has put such a search, so to speak, in parentheses. How, in good conscience, can we continue to dignify contemporary consciousness’ deliverance of man from the purportedly coercive power of God’s magisterium? Beyond Conscientious Autonomy: Catholic Dignity’s Dues to God Contemporary man’s consciousness calls out for a human dignity that requires autonomous self-determination, demands obedience only to those laws which man himself freely authors, and insist upon the supremacy of conscience. None of this changes the fact that Christ is our King. As Pope St. Pius X writes, this means that “we owe Him, therefore, not only a private cult, but a public and social worship to honor Him.” Preparations for the restored kingship of Christ will undoubtedly be many years, decades, perhaps even centuries in the making. In the meantime, we cannot deny that the Second Vatican Council’s attempt to “brings forth new things that are in harmony with the things that are old” resulted in the burial of demanding yet dignifying old things in the face of the dubious new. But it can be distracting to speak of things merely in terms of old and new. Perhaps it is best to speak of that which is true. Countenancing a Roman Empire that would have relished his retreat into private worship in the freedom of his own selfdetermined domus, St. Paul announced the truth that “There is no power but from God” (Rom. 13:1). We must not be afraid to teach and to persuade that “all public power must proceed from God.” With Pope Leo XIII, we must remember and reclaim the recognition that “God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the World. Everything without exception must be subject to Him, and must serve Him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern, holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God.” This may be an affront to the consciousness of contemporary man, grating, as it does, against the primacy of conscience and the dignity of self-determination. And yet, can we continue to rest satisfied with the relativism that has only increased since the Church strove to harmonize itself with contemporary man and his dignified demand for 83 The Angelus Press 2019 Liturgical Calendar features a beautiful image for each month corresponding to a particular Virtue.—Theological: Faith, Hope and Charity, as well as the Cardinal: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude and Temperance. Taken from various schools and forms these works are meant to inspire and increase our understanding of and assist in practice these necessary elements of living our Faith. Our complete liturgical calendar includes each feast day of the year according to the 1962 Roman Missal, as well as current disciplinary law and recommended traditional discipline for all days of fast and abstinence. 2019 Liturgical Calendar: The Virtues Bring the liturgical year to life by celebrating the feasts of the Church with your family! Learn of Me! It is clear that in order to model our heart on the Heart of Christ we cannot limit ourselves to eliminating this or that fault, to acquiring such and such a virtue; rather, we must strive to renew our whole life. However, when the divine Master offered us His Heart as a model, He spoke of two virtues in particular, meekness and humility: “Learn of Me because I am meek and humble of heart” (Mt. 11: 29). Charity “Christian, learn from Christ how you ought to love Christ. Learn a love that is tender, wise, strong; love with tenderness, not passion, wisdom, not foolishness, and strength, lest you become weary and turn away from the love of the Lord.” St. Bernard Monday 1 2 8 9 4 5 6 7 Tuesday Wednesday Thursday S M T W T 7 4 F S 1 2 3 8 9 10 11 12 13 5 Friday 1 April 2019 F S 3 First Friday Ferial St. Thomas Aquinas Monday 1 First Saturday Our Lady on Saturday Feast oF the Most Precious Blood oF Jesus Tuesday 2 6 Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Sts. Processus and Martinian, Martyrs Wednesday 3 St. Irenaeus, Bishop, Martyr Thursday 4 Ferial (Independence Day) Friday 5 6 First Saturday Our Lady on Saturday Monday October 2019 S M T W T 6 7 Tuesday F S 2 5 1 2 6 9 10 11 12 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 3 F S 4 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 3 4 5 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 28 29 30 27 28 29 30 31 29 30 31 3 4 3 4 (Comm.) 5 6 7 Ferial, St. Thomas Aquinas, Confessor, Doctor (Comm.) 8 Ferial, St. John of God, Confessor (Comm.) 9 Ferial, St. Frances of Rome, Widow (Comm.) 7 4th Sunday after Pentecost Sts. Cyril & Methodius, Bishops, Confessors 8 St. Elizabeth, Queen of Portugal, Queen, Widow 9 Ferial 10 The Seven Holy Brothers, Martyrs, and Sts. Rufina & Secunda, Virgins, Martyrs 11 Ferial St. Pius I, Pope, Martyr 17 Ferial, St. Alexius, Confessor (Comm.) 18 St. Camillus de Lellis, Confessor St. Symphorosa & her Seven Sons, Martyrs (Comm.) 12 St. John Gualbert, Abbot Sts. Nabor & Felix, Martyrs (Comm.) 13 Our Lady on Saturday 19 St. Vincent de Paul, Confessor 20 St. Jerome Emilian, Confessor St. Margaret, Virgin, Martyr (Comm.) 10 Our Lady on Saturday St. Pantaleon, Martyr 17 21st Sunday after Pentecost (Daylight saving time ends) Friday Saturday 1 THE FEAST OF ALL SAINTS First Friday 2 All SoulS dAy First Saturday 8 Ferial, Four Crowned Martyrs, Martyrs (Comm.) 9 Dedication of the Archbasilica of the Holy Savior St. Theodore, Martyr 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 ASh WedneSdAy Thursday 7 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Ferial Wednesday December 2019 S M T W T 1 8 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 St. Casimir, Confessor St. Lucius, Pope, Martyr St. John Vianney November Sunday Saturday First Friday St. Anthony Mary Zaccaria, Confessor (Comm.) 24 25 26 27 28 Quinquagesima Sunday “A humble person, whether he is laughed at or esteemed, or praised, or blamed, whether he is honored or despised, whether people pay attention to him or pass him by, it is all the same to him.” July Sunday Saturday 2 Humility “Temperance is simply a disposition of the mind that sets bounds on the passions.” March St. Bernard Sunday February 2019 S M T W T Temperance Not without reason has He spoken thus, knowing that when we have removed all movements and feelings of pride and self-love from our heart, we will also have suppressed all our other faults; and when we have acquired a profound humility, we will have acquired all the other virtues as well. St. Charles Borromeo, Bishop, Confessor Sts. Vitalis & Agricola Martyrs (Comm.) 5 Ferial 6 7 Ferial Ferial (Comm.) 10 1st Sunday of Lent Forty Holy Martyrs (Daylight saving time begins) 11 Ferial 12 Ferial, St. Gregory I, the Great, Pope, Doctor (Comm.) 13 Ember Wednesday 14 Ferial 15 Ember Friday 16 Ember Saturday 14 5th Sunday after Pentecost St. Bonaventure, Bishop, Confessor, Doctor 15 St. Henry, Emperor, Confessor 16 Ferial, Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Comm.) 22nd Sunday after Pentecost St. Andrew Avellino, Confessor 11 23rd Sunday after Pentecost St. Gregory the Wonderworker, Bishop, Confessor 18 Last Sunday after Pentecost St. John of the Cross, Confessor, Doctor 25 St. Martin of Tours, Bishop, Confessor St. Mennas, Martyr 12 St. Martin I, Pope, Martyr 13 St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Virgin St. Didacus, Confessor 14 St. Josaphat, Bishop, Martyr 15 St. Albert the Great, Bishop, Confessor, Doctor 16 St. Gertrude, Virgin 21 Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary 22 St. Cecilia, Virgin, Martyr 23 St. Clement I, Pope, Martyr St. Felicitas, Martyr (Comm.) (Comm.) Meekness (Comm.) “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.” C. S. Lewis 17 2nd Sunday of Lent St. Patrick, Bishop, Confessor 18 Ferial, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Bishop, Confessor, Doctor 19 (Comm.) 24 31 3rd Sunday of Lent St. Gabriel, Archangel 25 Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ferial (Comm.) 26 St. JoSeph Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Confessor Ferial (Comm.) 20 Ferial 27 Ferial Ferial, St. John Damascene, Confessor, Doctor (Comm.) 21 28 Ferial, St. Benedict, Abbot (Comm.) Ferial, St. John Capistran, Confessor (Comm.) 22 29 Ferial Ferial 23 30 Ferial Ferial 4th Sunday of Lent (Lætare Sunday) 21 28 6th Sunday after Pentecost St. Lawrence of Brindisi, Confessor, Doctor 22 7th Sunday after Pentecost 29 Sts. Nazarius & Celsus, Martyrs. St. Victor I, Pope, Martyr. St. Innocent I, Pope, Confessor St. Mary Magdalen, Penitent St. Martha, Virgin Sts. Felix, Simplicius, Faustinus, and Beatrice, Martyrs (Comm.) 23 30 St. Apollinaris, Bishop, Martyr St. Liborius, Bishop, Confessor (Comm.) 24 Ferial, Sts. Abdon & Sennen, Martyrs (Comm.) 31 Ferial, St. Christina, Virgin, Martyr (Comm.) St. Ignatius of Loyola, Confessor 25 St. James, Apostle St. Christopher, Martyr (Comm.) 26 St. Anne, Mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary 27 June 2019 (Comm.) August 2019 S M T W T F S 2 3 7 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 S M T W T 1 4 5 6 8 4 5 6 7 F S 1 2 8 9 10 3 24 Dedication of the Basilicas of Sts. Peter & Paul St. Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin, Martyr 19 26 St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Widow St. Pontianus, Pope, Martyr (Comm.) 20 St. Sylvester, Abbot St. Peter of Alexandria, Bishop, Martyr (Comm.) 27 St. Felix of Valois, Confessor Ferial 28 Ferial (Thanksgiving Day) 29 Ferial, St. Saturninus, Martyr (Comm.) 30 St. Andrew, Apostle 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Fresco of Our Lord, Basilica of San Zeno, Verona, Italy. (Comm.) 30 Humility “If then I being your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that as I have done to you, so you do also.” Jn. 13:12 Charity is a created participation in the charity, the infinite love with which God loves Himself, that is, the love with which the Father loves the Son, with which the Son loves the Father, and by which each loves the other in the Holy Spirit. Charity plunges us into the very center of God’s intimate life; it enables us to share in the infinite love of the three divine Persons. It makes us capable of loving God for Himself, because He is goodness, beauty, infinite wisdom. Temperance is the virtue which moderates in us the inordinate desire for sensible pleasure, keeping it within the limits assigned by reason and faith. It has not only a negative task, to temper, restrain, and moderate the disordered love of pleasure, but it has also a positive one: that of regulating our passions and permitting us to use our senses in perfect harmony with the requirements of the spirit, in such a way that they do not disturb our spiritual life. Humility is the virtue which keeps within just limits the love of one’s own excellence. Humility is truth: it tends to establish in truth both our intellect—by making us know ourselves as we really are— and our life, by inclining us to take, in relation to God and to men, our proper place and no other. Christian humility does not lower, it elevates; it does not cast down, but gives courage, for the more it reveals to the soul its nothingness and abjection, the more it moves it toward God with confidence and abandonment. Medieval fresco depicting washing of the feet at the Last Supper in Gelati Church near Kutaisi, Georgia. 13-month calendar – 12” x 12” – STK# CAL2019 – $12.95 Visit www.angeluspress.org — 1-800-966-7337 Please visit our website to see our entire selection of books, music, and more! Simply the Best Journal of Catholic Tradition Available! “Instaurare omnia in Christo” For over three decades, The Angelus has stood for Catholic truth, goodness, and beauty against a world gone mad. Our goal has always been the same: to show the glories of the Catholic Faith and to bear witness to the constant teaching of the Church in the midst of the modern crisis in which we find ourselves. Each issue contains: • A unique theme focusing on doctrinal and practical issues that matter to you, the reader • Regular columns, from History to Family Life, Spirituality and more • Some of the best and brightest Catholic thinkers and writers in the Englishspeaking world • An intellectual formation to strengthen your Faith in an increasingly hostile world Subscribe Today Don’t let another year go by without reading the foremost journal of Catholic Tradition. PRINT SUBSCRIPTIONS Name______________________________________________________________________________________________ Address____________________________________________________________________________________________ City______________________________ State______________ ZIP______________ Country______________________  CHECK  VISA  MASTERCARD  AMEX  DISCOVER  MONEY ORDER Card #_______________________________________________________ Exp. Date_____________________________ Phone # _____________________________________E-mail_________________________________________________ Mail to: Angelus Press, PO Box 217, St. Marys, KS 66536, USA PLEASE CHECK ONE United States  1 year $45.00  2 years $85.00  3 years $120.00 Foreign Countries (inc. Canada & Mexico)  1 year  2 years  3 years $65.00 $125.00 $180.00 All payments must be in US funds only. ONLINE ONLY SUBSCRIPTIONS To subscribe visit: www.angelusonline.org. Everyone has FREE access to every article from issues of The Angelus over two years old, and selected articles from recent issues. All magazine subscribers have full access to the online version of the magazine (a $20 Value)! The Last Word Dear readers, “Preach the Gospel to every creature!” Tradition tells us that St. Peter went to establish his See in Rome at the command of Our Blessed Lord. This divine strategy immediately enabled missionaries to make use of all the Roman networks as means to propagate the message of salvation, “the Verbum Crucis, the Word of the Cross” (I Cor. 1:18). The Church continued the same stratagem throughout the centuries whenever new lands were discovered. This became easier in later years when the leaders of state were fervent Catholics and encouraged, if they did not impose, the presence of priests to travel with the explorers, since these leaders knew firsthand the meaning of the Social Kingship of Christ. Thus, when Jacques Cartier, a fervent Catholic explorer, landed in Gaspé, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, now in Québec, in the summer of 1534, he took possession of the new territory in a most solemn way. Here it is in his own words: “On the 24th of the month, we built a 30 foot tall Cross in the presence of many (Indians)… upon which was written in large letters ‘Long live the King of France.’ They were watching us make and erect a similar Cross at the coast of this new land. After raising it up in the air, we all knelt down, with joined hands, and, adoring it in front of them, we made some signs, looking at and showing them Heaven, making them understand that through the Cross was our salvation. They repeatedly looked with wonder towards the Cross” (L. Groulx, La Découverte du Canada, 1934, pp. 172-173). At the sight of the mighty wealth that the discovery of the New World offered to the European countries, it is of the utmost importance to see how every participant understood his duty. Here we see at the beginning of the history of Canada (which had such an impact on the whole of North America when one thinks of all the missionaries and religious communities that came from there), more than 484 years ago, a Cross erected at the sight of and for the education of the natives, and, at the foot of this Cross, a small band of Breton sailors kneeling in an act of adoration, in the center of the group their captain, his soul captivated by the ideal of his Faith. This is how 16th century France manifested itself in the New World. Among so many ways of reaching a new land, what is better than the Cross? “When I erect a Cross in these islands,” said Fr. Pierre Henry, O.M.I. (+1979), the apostle of the Magnetic Pole, “Our Lord extends His kingdom!” “Thy Kingdom come!” Fr. Daniel Couture The Society of Saint Pius X is an international priestly society of almost 700 priests. Its main purpose is the formation and support of priests. The goal of the Society of Saint Pius X is to preserve the Catholic Faith in its fullness and purity, not changing, adding to or subtracting from the truth that the Church has always taught, and to diffuse its virtues, especially through the Roman Catholic priesthood. Authentic spiritual life, the sacraments, and the traditional liturgy are its primary means to foster virtue and sanctity and to bring the divine life of grace to souls. The Angelus, in helping the whole man, tries to be an outlet for the work of the Society, helping them reach souls. We aspire to help deepen your spiritual life, nourish your studies, understand the history of Christendom, and restore the reign of Christ the King in Christian culture in every aspect. $ 9.00 RETURN UNDELIVERABLE CANADIAN ADDRESSES TO: THE ANGELUS, 480 MCKENZIE STREET, WINNIPEG, MB, R2W 5B9